The Survey Lodge Catalpas

The small stone building these catalpas flank was made out of the Washington Monument's leftovers. Survey Lodge went up in 1889 from marble and granite spare from the monument itself, and housed the boiler that drove the first elevator to the top. The trees came about thirteen years later, part of an oval carriage road lined with fir, pine, crape myrtle and catalpa that was in place by 1902. They stand where a visitor walks straight into them, between the lodge's front door and the road, which is why the Park Service lists them among the trees on this ground worth protecting rather than treating them as ordinary shade. The date is not perfectly settled, and the two accounts of it do not pretend otherwise. The National Park Trust says flatly that they were planted in 1902. The Park Service is more careful and says only that they could date from the turn of the century planting. Either reading puts them here through the 1930s, when the monument beside them shut for its first major restoration and the ground was dug over around their roots. Nobody has settled the species either. Northern and southern catalpa both grow in Washington and neither source says which these are, so you can work on it yourself in June: the northern carries fewer, larger flowers, the southern more of them and smaller. Both hang the same long seed pods afterwards. The lodge is a ranger office and closed. The trees are not.