334 Division of Forestry. [Bull. 165 



purple, and slightly puberulous. During their first winter they are thick- 

 ened at the nodes, lustrous light orange color or gray-brown covered with 

 a slight glaucous bloom, and marked with large, pale, scattered lenticels, 

 the outer layer of the thin bark separating easily from the bright green 

 inner layer. The leaf-scars, in which appear a circle of conspicuous 

 fibro-vascular bundle scars, are large, oval, and elevated, and do not en- 

 tirely disappear until the third or fourth year, when the branches are 

 reddish brown, and marked with a network of thin, flat, brown ridges. 

 The branch continues to grow throughout the summer, the end dying in 

 the autumn, without forming a terminal bud, and appearing during the 

 winter as a black scar by the side of the upper axillary bud. The ax- 

 illary buds are minute, globose, and deeply immersed in the bark, with 

 several pairs of chestnut-brown, broadly ovate, rounded, slightly puberu- 

 lous and loosely imbricated scales; those of the inner ranks are accrescent, 

 and when fully grown are bright green, pubescent, and sometimes two 

 inches in length. The leaves are opposite and in threes, broadly ovate, 

 rather abruptly contracted into slender points, or sometimes rounded at 

 the apex, cordate at the base, and entire or often laterally lobed. When 

 they unfold they are coated on the lower surface with a pale tomentum, 

 and are pilose on the upper surface; and at maturity they are thin and 

 firm, light green and glabrous above, pale and pubescent below, five or six 

 inches long and four or five inches broad, with stout, terete petioles five 

 or six inches in length, prominent midribs and primary veins arcuate 

 near the margins, connected by reticulate veinlets, and furnished in their 

 axils with clusters of dark glands. They smell disagreeably when bruised, 

 and turn black and fall to the ground after the first frost of the autumn. 

 The flowers, which appear from May in the South to July in New Eng- 

 land, are produced in compact, many-flowered panicles eight or ten 

 inches long or broad, with light green branches tinged with purple, and 

 are borne in slender pubescent pedicels half an inch in length. The calyx 

 is half an inch in length, and green or light purple. The corolla is white, 

 with a broad, companulate, flat tube, and spreading limb, which, when it 

 is expanded, is an inch and a half wide and nearly two inches long; it is 

 marked on the inner surface on the lower side with two rows of yellow 

 blotches following the parallel lateral ridges or folds, and in the throat 

 and on the lower lobes of the limb with crowded conspicuous purple spots. 

 The stamens and the style are slightly exserted. The fruit, which ripens 

 in the autumn, hangs in thick-branched, orange-colored panicles, and re- 

 mains on the trees without opening during the winter; it is six to twenty 

 inches long, a quarter to a third of an inch thick in the middle, with a thin 

 wall, which is bright chestnut-brown on the outside and light olive-brown 

 and lustrous on the inside, and in the spring splits into two flat valves 

 before finally falling; the partition is thin and light brown. The seed is 

 about an inch long, a quarter of an inch wide, silvery gray, with pointed 

 wings, terminating in long, pencil-shaped tufts of white hairs. 



"Catalpa catalpa is usually supposed to be indigenous on the banks of 

 the rivers of southwestern Georgia, western Florida, and central Alabama 

 and Mississippi. The hardiness of this tree, however, in severe climates 

 like that of New England, would indicate an origin in some colder and 

 more elevated regipn, and it is possible that the catalpa trees which now 



