PRACTICAL ARBORTCULT URE 439 
Severe rain storms which occurred in early spring also tended to prevent 
complete fertilization of the Catalpa speciosa. 
At no time is speciosa as free to seed, nor does it ever produce nearly as 
much as the hybrid sorts or bignonioides, and it can never be sold at the prices 
quoted by the U.S. Forestry Bureau of twenty cents per pound. For several 
years the seed has cost from $2 to $3 per pound, some land owners demanding 
fifty cents per pound for privilege of gathering the crop. 
As an instance of the difficulties in the wav of procuring pure Catalpa 
Spectosa seed, at Evansville, Ind., | was told by a gentleman in Vanderberg 
County that upon his farm were a thousand Catalpa seed, and that I could 
load a steamboat with the seed pods. 
This farm is just opposite the mouth of Green River, in Kentucky. I 
took passage on a small Green River steamboat and went to see the Catalpa 
trees. I found just what the gentleman had told me, several thousand trees 
so laden with seed that I could in two or three days have loaded the steamboat 
twice over. But they were bignonioides and hybrids. 
From far up the headwaters of Green River, in Macon and Summer Coun- 
ties, Tenn., only a few miles from the Cumberland River where Catalpa big- 
nonioides was found by the French and called “Bois Shavanon,” in 1725, the 
seed has floated down the Green River, catching, here and there, and as seed 
from those trees again floated downward, generations of trees sending the seed 
further down stream, they finally reached the Ohio River, and were cast upon 
the shore where my friend’s farm is located. 
Only five miles away were native forests of pure Catalpa spectosa, a few 
of the trees still remaining. 
