BIGNONIACER, SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 89 
CATALPA SPECIOSA. 
Western Catalpa. 
FLOWERS in few-flowered open panicles; corolla inconspicuously spotted. Fruit 
stout. Leaves caudate-acuminate. 
Catalpa speciosa, Engelmann, Bot. Gazette, v. 1 (1880). — Nuttall, Trans. Am. Phil. Soc. ser. 2, v. 183 (not 
Ridgway, Proc. U. S. Nat. Mus. 1882, 70. — Sargent, Moench). 
Forest Trees N. Am. 10th Census U. S. ix. 115.— Catalpa bignonioides, Lesquereux, Owen’s Second Rep. 
Gray, Syn. Fl. N. Am. ed. 2, i. pt. ii. 456. — Lauche, Geolog. Surv. Ark. 375 (not Walter) (1860). — Gray, 
Deutsche Dendr. ed. 2, 145. — Watson & Coulter, Gray’s Man. ed. 5, 321 (in part); Syn. Fl. N. Am. ii. pt. i 
Man. ed. 6, 399. — Koehne, Deutsche Dendr. 520. 319 (in part). — Broadhead, Bot. Gazette, iii. 59. 
Catalpa cordifolia, Nouveau Duhamel, ii. t. 5 (1802). — 
A tree, in the forest occasionally one hundred and twenty feet in height, with a tall straight trunk 
rarely four and a half feet in diameter, and a narrow round-topped crown of slender branches; usually 
smaller, although often a hundred feet high, and when grown in open situations rarely more than fifty 
feet in height, with a short trunk and a broad head of spreading branches. The bark of the trunk is 
three quarters of an inch or sometimes nearly an inch in thickness, brown tinged with red, and broken 
on the surface into thick scales. The branchlets are stout, and when they first appear are light green, 
often tinged with purple, and covered with scattered pale hairs; during their first winter they are light 
orange-color or reddish brown, covered with a slight bloom, and marked with many pale conspicuous 
lenticels, and with the elevated oval leaf-scars which are a quarter of an inch long and display a circular 
row of large fibro-vascular bundle-scars ; in their second and third years the branches grow darker 
and the leaf-scars and lenticels nearly disappear. The end of the branch dies in the autumn without 
forming a terminal bud, and during the winter appears as an elevated circular scar close to the upper 
axillary bud. The buds are minute, globose, partly immersed in the bark, and covered with loosely 
imbricated chestnut-brown ovate scales, keeled on the back and slightly apiculate at the apex; those of 
the inner ranks are accrescent, and at maturity are foliaceous, obovate, acute, gradually narrowed below 
to a sessile base, many-nerved with dark veins, pubescent on the lower surface, and sometimes nearly two 
and a half inches long and three quarters of an inch broad. The leaves are opposite, or in threes, oval, 
long-pointed, cordate at the base, and usually entire or furnished with one or two lateral teeth; when 
they unfold they are pilose on the upper surface and covered on the lower and on the petioles with pale 
or rufous tomentum which soon disappears, and at maturity they are thick and firm, dark green above, 
and pale and covered with soft pubescence below, especially along the stout midribs and the principal 
veins marked in their axils with large clusters of dark glands; they are ten to twelve inches long, seven 
or eight inches broad, and are borne on stout terete petioles four to six inches in length. They turn black 
and fall after the first severe frost of the autumn. The flowers, which appear late in May or early in 
June, are borne on slender purple pedicels furnished near the middle with one, two, or three bractlets, 
and are produced in open few-flowered glabrous panicles five or six inches long and broad, with green 
or purple branches marked with orange-colored lenticels, the lowest branches being often developed 
from the axils of small leaves. The calyx is purple, and divided to the base into two ovate pointed 
apiculate divisions. The corolla is white, with a broad conical oblique tube nearly an inch long, often 
marked externally with purple spots near the base and internally on the lower side with two bands of 
yellow blotches which follow two parallel lateral ridges, and with occasional purple spots spreading over 
the lobes of the lower lip of the limb, which, when the flower is fully open, has a vertical diameter of 
