With its huge heart-shaped leaves, showy spring flowers and long seed pods, the catalpa tree adds serious wow factor to any backyard. It makes a lovely shade tree for the middle of a lawn, but it can ...

Pollarding is a type of severe pruning that results in a dense growth of branches at the pruning site instead of its naturally shaped crown. Last fall, I decided to pollard a catalpa tree to re-create ...

Catalpas are irregularly shaped trees shrouded in deeply ridged, coarse gray bark. These quirky trees grow quickly and can easily reach heights of 40-70 feet tall. Their rapid growth rate and ...

There’s a catalpa tree seeding that I’ve been watching for a few years now. It sprouted up on its own from seed right along the edge of a flower garden in a spot where it wasn’t bothering neighboring ...

Almost every tree needs to be pruned at some point in its life. Sometimes a tree may need to be trimmed to help it, such as dealing with storm damage, reducing limb weight, removing dead limbs and ...

Most Arkansas anglers learn at an early age how to recognize the catalpa tree, with its big heart-shaped leaves, spotted white flowers and long cigarlike seed pods. Across its range, which stretches ...

Meghan Holmes is a writer and documentarian specializing in scientific topics such as the environment, invasive species, sustainability, and food issues. She holds a master's in Southern Studies from ...

There was one northern catalpa tree in my neighborhood when I was a child. I didn’t know what it was, but I loved that tree. In June, it had clusters of large bell-shaped, ruffled white flowers with ...

Steve Nix is a member of the Society of American Foresters and a former forest resources analyst for the state of Alabama. The Catalpa tree's name (Catalpa sp.) made it into English and Latin via ...