Lance Mannion: Weather Report. June 27, 2014.

The blossoms on the Catalpas have blown. Monday I noticed petals around the base of some trees. Tuesday more petals, far fewer blossoms, and the ones still in the trees looked pretty ragged. Wednesday there were almost no flowers left. Far as I’ve been able to see, there’s only one Catalpa tree still in flower along the whole twelve mile stretch between here and New Paltz. That one isn’t just in flower. It’s in full flower, looking like all the other catalpas did two weeks ago. Could be a different, later blooming species. Glad to see it, whatever it is, when I drove by this morning. Which surprised me. Tell you why.

Catalpas have been annoying me this year.

For some reason I’ve taken a dislike to them. They’ve never been among my favorite trees. They’re not handsome. Not shapely. In open yards and fields where they’re ornamentals, they can spread out their branches to make shade, but where they’ve escaped into the wild, they’re mostly small-scale opportunists with limited ambitions, sprouting up in gaps where other trees have failed to take root, which means they tend grow in narrow spaces along roadsides where they have room to grow up but not out. But I don’t recall ever much minding them before. I’ve been racking my brains, trying to figure out what I suddenly have against them.

All I’ve come up with is I just don’t like the look of them.

Their perfectly spade-shaped leaves are too big and too green and too much an unleafy shade of green, even an unnatural shade of green, at that. Science fiction green. Night vision goggle green. Shrek green. Halloween make-up green.

And while their leaves are too big, their flowers are too small, as if they were designed for medium-sized bushes and not tall trees, and they have a dirty, shop-worn look and hang haphazardly, as if someone’s gathered the discarded boutonnieres from last night’s prom and strung them up in loose, random bunches without design, thought, or care.

Most trees flower before they leaf. With catalpas, flowering’s an after-thought, and a half-hearted effort. Hawthorns and apple trees go all snowy-white. Catalpas merely develop clusters of cauliflower-colored polka dots.

Did I say catalpas annoy me?

They infuriate me.

And I blame them.

As if they’re choosing not to be maples or birches or walnut trees out of spite.

So I was actually looking forward to their dropping their flowers so they would blend in with the other, better looking, un-spiteful trees, or, at any rate, I thought I was.

But when I saw this one, late and tenaciously blooming catalpa, which, by the way, stands practically alone in a field behind a farmhouse where it’s had lots of room to branch out, I smiled and said, “Power on, dude!” Or I would have said it if I’d had time to stop and walk over to it and I believed trees can hear and understand (Some people will tell you they do.) and I was actually inclined to say “Power on, dude” to anyone or anything, flora or fauna.

The thing is that with the catalpas blown the only color beside green left in the upper canopy is the yellow of the tips of the leaves at the tips of the branches of the honey locusts and once that’s gone there’ll be nothing but unrelieved green until the trees that bear fruit bear fruit.

Unless you count the olive-colored cones of flowers on the sumacs, if you can call a sumac a tree, which I suppose you can, the way you can call a Cooper Mini a car or the Chicago Cubs a Major League Baseball team.

April 2021