The Catalpa of the Waterloo Monastery Park

It stands directly beside a giant sequoia, and the pairing tells you what the monastery gardeners were doing. Steyl is a village on the Maas that became a centre of Catholic missionary orders from 1875, and the communities that settled here laid out grounds on a scale a village would never otherwise see. What they planted was not native. It was a collection: species from the Americas and Asia, arranged so that a walk through the park was also an argument about the size of the world. A catalpa and a sequoia side by side is that idea in two trees. One from the southeastern United States, one from the Sierra Nevada, planted within a decade or so of each other by people whose whole purpose was to send members abroad. The catalpa is the more surprising of the two. It comes into leaf later than anything else, holds enormous heart-shaped leaves, then flowers in late June and early July in upright spikes of white bells marked yellow and purple in the throat. After that it hangs slender beans up to forty centimetres long, which stay on all winter. Go in the first week of July.