island of trees: Southern catalpa find comfort by northern home

PLEASE NOTE LIST OF  UPCOMING TREEWALKS IN THE PRECEEDING BLOG: 

NEXT TUESDAY: PARC LA FONTAINE

This southern catalpa, Catalpa bignonioides, has grown for at least a century beside this Westmount home at the corner of Forden and Montrose streets, a stones throw from Murray Park. Note the unusually shaped leaves, as compared to the more common Northern catalpa, Catalpa speciosa, and the smaller seed pod. Illustrations: Charles L'Heureux

I left my doctor’s office last week with an assignment. “By the way,” he said, while writing my prescription. “There’s a tree you have to check out. It grows at the corner of Montrose and Forden. It’s an old ginkgo and has beautiful flowers.”

“Doesn’t sound like a ginkgo,” I said. “They don’t have flowers.”

Nevertheless, my interest was stirred and I stopped at this corner, just a block east of Murray Park, on my way home. True, this was a stunning tree and I could see how the shape of this old dowager might by taken at a distance for a mature ginkgo. The two burnished trunks angled outwards and the branches spread laterally giving the tree an Asian look, something like an overgrown bonsai.

Up close, the long, thin bean-like fruit and the large, generally cordiform (heart-shaped) leaves made the genus easy to identify: Catalpa. No other tree sports such a fruit. While the 25-centimetre long pod looks much like a very thin bean, its inners tell a different tale. In fact while cleaning out my purse, I got a bit of a start by what looked like winged bugs nestled in the weave of the fabric. I quickly realized, however, that the catalpa pod I’d picked had split and these were the winged seeds. I should mention that this pod was last year’s, now dry and burgundy-coloured on the branch, while this year’s immature pods are bright green.

As it turns out, the Catawba First Nations, who lived on the Catawba River in the Carolinas, also saw the wing-like whiskers on either side of the centimetre-long disamara (2-seeded winged fruit, like maple keys) and named them Kuthlapa, meaning “head with wings.” This, I have learned from one of my favourite tree books, Arboretum America: A Philosophy of the Forest, by Diana Beresford-Kroeger.

While all of the world’s 11 species of catalpa feature this seed structure, I’m not sure that this Westmount catalpa is the same one known to the Catawba people. That catalpa, Catalpa speciosa, is the most northerly of the two North American catalpa species and is the most common one in Montreal, found frequently on the grounds of the old mansions of the Golden Square Mile, on the McGill University campus and in La Fontaine Park. You’ll find more on that tree in my column of June 20, 2010.

Tall and narrow in stature, the northern catalpa, features uniformly huge and heart-shaped, alternate leaves of a bright apple green. The leaves of today’s tree, however, are highly varied, some cordiform, some round, some with three lobes, and all with a soft velour on the underside. Having studied the leaves illustrated in The Sibley Guide to Trees, I have to conclude that this sprawling variety of catalpa is either the southern catalpa, Catalpa bignonioides, native to the southern Mississippi and southwestern Georgia, or the Chinese catalpa, Catalpa ovata, or the common cross between the two.

This is a rare tree in Montreal. The only others I’ve seen live in Ytizhak Rabin Park in Côte St-Luc, and in front the nun’s residence at Hôtel Dieu Hospital, at the most westerly entrance off Pine Avenue. From what the owner of the century-old house told me about the grounds surround the house she has occupied since 1960, the original owner, Robert M. Ballantyne was a man interested in exotic trees – or had a gardener with such interests. The actual owner, a white-haired woman with warm brown eyes, spoke lovingly about her catalpa that flowers each June, or early July, its panicles of orchid-like white flowers, later falling like confetti on the grass beneath.

“But before the catalpa, my favourite was the tulip tree that grew by the back steps,” she said from the southern entrance to her house, motioning to the slate-roofed garage. “The flowers were lime green just like your jersey,” she said.

That tulip tree, assuming it was planted at the time the house was built in 1903, may have been the first ever planted on the island. That tree, another southerner, though native as far north as southwestern Ontario, along with the catalpa, the saucer magnolia and the European spindle tree growing south of the house, all tell the story of someone with a good knowledge of trees and an interested in trying them out beyond their northern limits. Clearly, this southern catalpa found comfort close to the warm brick of this northern house.