BIGNONIACEA. 
SILVA OF NORTH AMERICA. 
91 
The dark green foliage of the Western Catalpa, and its abundant clusters of large nearly white 
flowers, which begin to appear on plants eight to twelve years old, make it a valuable ornamental tree, 
and it is already a familiar inhabitant in many of the gardens of the United States and Europe. 
land in 1813, and having learned the tailor’s trade, emigrated to 
Canada in 1836. Two years later he settled in Whitingham, Ver- 
mont, where for a short time he kept the country inn, but the tide 
of emigration was setting to the west, and in 1844 he drove through 
the then sparsely inhabited country to Illinois, and established his 
home on the shores of Lake Michigan about thirty miles north of 
Chicago, in what is now the town of Waukegan. Here he opened 
a tailor’s shop ; but in 1848, impelled by a strong love of nature 
which had declared itself in his boyhood, when he lived with his 
parents in Fallon’s nursery near Newcastle, he established a small 
nursery business. The next year, the California gold fever being 
at its height, Mr. Douglas joined a party of his neighbors and 
started to cross the continent. In fording the Bear River, among 
the Wahsatch Mountains, he lost his team of cattle, and, impatient 
of the slow progress of the emigrant train, walked on alone ahead 
of his party, crossing the deserts of Utah and Nevada and the 
After a short stay in California, Mr. 
Douglas returned home by the Isthmus of Panama, and has since 
Sierra Nevada on foot. 
devoted himself to raising conifer and other tree seedlings, of 
which he has distributed millions. In recent years Mr. Douglas 
has taken large contracts for planting trees in different parts of 
the country, and the most successful plantations of Catalpa speciosa 
in the United States were made by him near Farlington, in Kansas, 
on the line of the Kansas City, Fort Scott & Memphis Railroad, 
in 1879-83. (See 6th Ann. Rep. Kansas Forestry, 47.) No one in 
his time has been more active than Mr. Douglas in increasing the 
love of planting trees in the United States, or has studied them 
from the cultural point of view with greater zeal, intelligence, and 
success. 
