The Elder Kugeltrompetenbaum of Schrankgasse

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 happens by accident. Catalpa bignonioides 'Nana' is a dwarf cultivar, grafted rather than grown from seed, and left alone it would form nothing like a sphere. The roundness is decades of pruning holding a shape somebody chose on purpose. The city's Baumkataster dates this one to 1977, which makes it not far off fifty years old, with a trunk 117 centimetres round, modest for a catalpa but ordinary for a cultivar bred to stay small. It grows on Schrankgasse in Neubau, Vienna's 7th district, a short walk from the inner Ring, one of two ball headed catalpas standing together at the same address. The ordinary Southern Catalpa is a big, loose limbed tree known for coming into leaf absurdly late and for the thin bean-like pods that give it the name Indian bean tree. This is the same species wearing a haircut. The leaves and the flowers, when they come, belong to the same plant, just carried on a crown somebody has kept a sphere for half a century. Single-sourced on the city's own tree register; no independent account of this specific tree has turned up yet.