The Younger Kugeltrompetenbaum of Schrankgasse

Its neighbour a few metres away has had fifty years to grow into its shape. This one has had ten, and it shows: a trunk 37 centimetres round against the older tree's 117, both recorded on the same Baumkataster page for Schrankgasse in Neubau. Vienna planted this second ball headed catalpa here in 2016, an ordinary piece of municipal tree planting, except that it leaves a pair of the same cultivar standing together at two very different ages, close enough to compare by eye. Catalpa bignonioides 'Nana' is grafted onto a standard trunk and pruned into a dense globe that the wild form of the species never makes on its own. Nurseries sell the young graft as an already-finished shape, and the city's job afterward is mostly keeping it that way. It will be decades before this one closes the gap with its older neighbour, if it ever does, since a Kugelbaum's ceiling is set at the nursery more than in the ground. For now it is the smaller half of a small, tidy pair on an ordinary Vienna street, worth a look precisely because the older tree beside it shows what fifty more years does to the same shape. Register-only source, like its neighbour; nothing else has been found about it yet.