Every spring this tree gives its street a fright.
Southern Catalpa
Catalpa bignonioides
Old catalpas rarely grow straight, and Dutch gardeners have learned to let them. We map 14 of them, in 13 cities.
In April 1973 a storm knocked one flat in the grounds of Paleis Soestdijk in Baarn, and Queen Juliana told her gardener to leave it where it fell; new trunks have risen along its length since. Deventer's at De Lathmer has gone horizontal with age and lies across the grass, still flowering every summer. Breda's leans so far out over the pond in Wilhelminapark that the municipality props its lowest limbs on columns, and Milan's has spent about 136 years twisting behind a baroque fish pond in the Giardini della Guastalla. The species comes from a small pocket of the southeastern United States and is far commoner in European gardens than at home. It is bare well into May, then hangs out speckled cream trumpets in July and long thin pods after.
Amsterdam
Milan
Milan's oldest public garden, laid out in 1555 for a countess who did not live to see it finished, keeps its strangest tree behind a baroque fish pond nobody expects to find in the middle of the city.
Photo: Fontema (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Breda
This catalpa grew sideways instead of up, and Breda decided to help it keep doing so.
Vienna
Vienna's tree register lists this catalpa as a Kugeltrompetenbaum, a ball trumpet tree, and the name is the whole shape of it: a standard trunk topped with a dense, perfectly round crown that never...
Its neighbour a few metres away has had fifty years to grow into its shape.
Eindhoven
Nobody can say whether this catalpa or the museum beside it came first.
Copenhagen
The catalpa is among the last trees in any garden to come into leaf, so for several weeks each spring it stands there looking dead while everything around it is green.
Photo: Hans Erik Lund
Utrecht
Wilhelminapark's own walking guide to its oldest trees calls this one Trompetboom, trumpet tree, the Dutch common name for catalpa, and once it flowers in July the name explains itself: white, orch...
Amersfoort
It is growing on a defensive earthwork built to keep the duke of Gelre out.
Venlo
It stands directly beside a giant sequoia, and the pairing tells you what the monastery gardeners were doing.
Deventer
Most catalpas stand up.
Baarn
In April 1973 a storm knocked this catalpa flat in the grounds of Paleis Soestdijk, and Queen Juliana told her gardener to leave it exactly where it fell.
Heerlen
This catalpa stands outside Heerlen's town hall, built from the local Kunrade limestone in a style locals still call Roman, and the register bands its planting to 1910-1920, putting it at around 11...
Roosendaal
This catalpa stands southwest of a building on Burgerhoutsestraat, banded by the national register to a planting around 1900, roughly 130 years old.
Explore by city: Amsterdam · Milan · Breda · Vienna · Eindhoven · Copenhagen · Utrecht · Amersfoort · Venlo · Deventer · Baarn · Heerlen · every city · or browse all species.