Part 47

Seven species of catalpa are known, two of them occurring in the United States. Others are found in China and the West Indies. The name is an Indian word and was first heard among the tribes of the Carolinas. It seems probable that the name catalpa as applied to a tree and catawba, applied to a grape, have the same origin, and in some way refer to the Catawba Indians, a small tribe--said to be Sioux--that lived two hundred years ago in the western part of the Carolinas and neighboring regions where one of the catalpa species was first heard of by Europeans. The tree in that region is still often called catawba.

The two catalpas of this country are known to botanists as Catalpa speciosa and Catalpa catalpa. Much confusion has resulted from attempts to distinguish one from the other. Botanists are able to clear the matter up among themselves, but the general public has not been so successful. John P. Brown, of Connersville, Indiana, specialized on catalpas during many years, and published numerous tracts, pamphlets, and books for the purpose of educating the public to the point where the differences between common catalpa and hardy catalpa could be distinguished. His labor was likewise directed toward inducing land owners to plant catalpa for commercial purposes. Due to his efforts, and otherwise, catalpa was for a time the most advertised plantation tree in this country. Some supposed that hardy catalpa was the wood which was to save the country from a threatened timber famine. Claims made for it were wide and far reaching.

The judgment of history has been--if it may be classed as a matter of history--that the tree fell short of expectation. This does not imply an inferiority of the wood itself, or a slower rate of growth than was claimed for it; but exceptional cases were interpreted as averages, and for that reason the whole situation was overestimated. When all conditions are perfect, hardy catalpa grows rapidly and grows large, but it demands nearly perfect conditions or it will disappoint. It wants ground rich enough and damp enough to grow good crops of corn, and farmers are not generally willing to put that class of land to growing fence posts and railroad ties.

The range of hardy catalpa before the species was spread by artificial planting, was through southern Illinois and Indiana, southeastern Missouri and northeastern Arkansas, western Louisiana and eastern Texas, and western Kentucky and Tennessee. Its position on the fertile banks of streams, and on flood plains subject to frequent inundation, indicates that the spread of the species was effected by running water. In that case, the dispersal of seeds would be down stream, implying that the starting place of the species was along the lower reaches of the Wabash river.

The catalpa may reach a height of 100 or 120 feet and a diameter of four feet; but few trees attain that size. The leaves are ten or twelve inches long and seven or eight wide, and are considerably larger than those of common catalpa. The flowers appear late in May or early in June, and are showy. The prevailing colors are white and purple, and the blossoms are about two inches long and two and a half wide.

The fruit is a pod from eight to twenty inches long, and the enclosed seeds are nearly an inch long, shaped like beans. The trees are prolific bearers.

The tree is known by several names in different parts of its range, including the territory where it is known only from plantings. It is called western catalpa to distinguish it from the other species found farther east and south. In Missouri and Iowa it is known as cigar tree. The name Indian bean is an allusion to the large seeds. Shawneewood is another name referring to the supposed interest of Indians in the tree. Shawnee was the name of a tribe of Indians in the Ohio valley in early times.

The wood weighs less than twenty-six pounds per cubic foot, and is soft and weak. It is rated very durable in contact with the soil, and this is one of the chief advantages claimed for it. The annual rings are clearly marked by several bands or rows of large open ducts, and the denser summerwood forms a narrow band. The medullary rays are numerous and obscure. The heartwood is brown, the sapwood lighter. In appearance, the heartwood suggests butternut, but it is coarser, and lacks the gloss shown by polished butternut. Quarter-sawing produces no figure, but when sawed at right angles to the radial lines, the annual rings are cut in a way to give figure resembling that of ash or chestnut.

The wood of this catalpa has been thoroughly tried out for a number of purposes. Furniture and finish have been made of it with varying success, and molding and picture frames are listed among its uses. It is not a sawlog tree. Statistics of lumber cut seldom mention it, though now and then a log finds its way to a mill. Efforts have been made to pass the wood as mahogany, but with poor success. The counterfeit is easily detected, since the artificial color which may be imparted to catalpa is about the only resemblance to mahogany.

In the lower Mississippi valley some success, but on a very small scale, has resulted from attempts to induce catalpa to grow in crooks suitable for small boat knees. The young trunk, after being hacked on one side, is bent and induced to grow the crook or knee. Natural crooks have been utilized in the manufacture of knees for small boats in Louisiana.

Probably ninety per cent of all the catalpa ever cut has gone into fence posts. It is habitually crooked. A straight bole is the exception; though in plantations trees are crowded and pruned until they grow fairly straight, and sometimes trunks of forest grown trees of large size are nearly faultless in their symmetry.

It was once believed in some quarters that catalpa would solve the railroad tie problem by growing good ties quickly. It must be admitted, however, that in spite of extensive plantings, the railroad tie problem has not yet been solved by catalpa.

COMMON CATALPA (Catalpa catalpa) originated many hundred miles outside the range of hardy catalpa, to judge by the localities in which it was first found by white men. It is supposed to have been indigenous in southwestern Georgia, central Alabama, and Mississippi, and northwestern Florida. Its range has been greatly extended by planting, and it grows in most parts of the country east of the Rocky Mountains, as far north as New England. It has been planted in many parts of Europe. Its leaves, flowers, fruit, and the tree itself are smaller than hardy catalpa. The pods hang unopened all winter. The trunks sometimes are three feet in diameter and sixty high, but are generally small, crooked, rather angular, and poor in appearance, but the leaves and flowers are ornamental. The wood is durable in contact with the ground, and its largest use has been for posts, crossties, and poles.

DESERT WILLOW (Chilopsis linearis) does not even belong to the willow family, notwithstanding its names, all of which are based on the presumption that it is a willow. The shape and size of its leaves are responsible for that misapprehension. The very narrow leaves may be a foot long. It is called flowering willow and Texas flowering willow. Its flowers are always emphasized when it is compared with willow, for they are totally different from the willow’s characteristic catkins. The flowers appear in early summer in racemes three or four inches long, and continue open during several months in succession. The fruit is a pod seven or nine inches long, and as slender as a lead pencil. It is this pod which gives the plainest hint of its relationship to the catalpas, for it is in good standing in the family with them. The seeds resemble very small beans with wings at each end. They are light, and the wind disperses them. The tree is a prolific seeder.

The range of this small tree extends across western Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, into San Diego county, California. The tree occurs in dry, gravelly, porous soil near the banks of streams and in depressions in the desert. The wood is weak and soft, the heart brown, streaked with yellow. No use has been found for it. The tree is cultivated for ornament in Mexico and sometimes in the southern states. The flowers look well when they are encountered in the desert. They are white, faintly tinged with purple, with bright yellow spots inside. They are funnel shaped and have the odor of violets.

CUCUMBER

CUCUMBER

(Magnolia Acuminata)

This tree is a member of the magnolia family which has ten genera in North America, two of them, magnolia and liriodendron, being trees. The family has its name from Pierre Magnol, a French botanist who died in 1715. The genus magnolia has seven species in the United States, all of which are of tree size. They are evergreen magnolia (Magnolia fœtida), sweet magnolia (Magnolia glauca), cucumber (Magnolia acuminata), largeleaf umbrella (Magnolia macrophylla), umbrella tree (Magnolia tripetala), Fraser umbrella (Magnolia fraseri), and pyramidal magnolia (Magnolia pyramidata). The remaining member of the magnolia family is the yellow poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera). Though of the same family it is of a different genus from the seven other magnolias.

The cucumber is the hardiest member of the magnolia family. It is found in natural growth farther north than any other, yet it has the appearance of a southern tree. All magnolias look like trees belonging in the South. Their large leaves indicate as much, and some of them do not venture far outside of the warm latitudes. It is one of the oldest of all the families of broadleaf trees, and it has been a family that during an immense period of the earth’s history has clung near the old homestead where it came into existence countless ages ago. There were magnolias growing in the middle Appalachian region, and eastward to the present Atlantic coast, so far in the past that the time can be measured only by hundreds of thousands of years. Leaf prints in rocks, which were once mud flats, tell the story--though but a page here and there--of the magnolia’s ancient history, doubtless antedating by long periods the earliest appearance of man on earth.

Next to the yellow poplar, the cucumber tree is the most important species of the magnolia family, at least as a source of lumber. As an ornamental tree it may not equal some of the others, particularly certain of the southern species which are evergreen and produce large, showy flowers.

The cucumber tree receives its name from its fruit, which looks like a cucumber when seen at a distance, but it is far from being one. Its intense bitter makes it safe from the attacks of birds and beasts. So far as known, it is not eaten, tasted, or touched by any living creature--except man. Some of the pioneer settlers, in the days when there was precious little to eat on the frontiers, discovered a way of extracting the bitter from the wild cucumber, and making some sort of a pickle of the remainder; but the art seems to have been lost with the passing of the pioneers of the Daniel Boone type, and the wild cucumber now hangs untouched, and tempts nobody. It is three inches or less in length, generally slightly curved, and is green in color until fully ripe. Even the flowers which produce the fruit are green, with the merest suggestion of yellow. They are so inconspicuous that few persons ever notice them, even though cucumber trees stand in door yards. The ripe cucumbers are dark red or scarlet, or rather the seeds are, which grow on the surface like grains of corn on a cob, though fewer in number and farther apart. Something seems to be lacking in the machinery by which the flowers are fertilized, with the result that often nearly half the seeds which ought to cover the surface of the cucumber, fail to materialize. There are many blank spaces representing flowers which the pollen missed.

There is likewise something missing in the modus operandi of scattering the seeds. They have no wings, and the wind is powerless to carry them. They are as bitter as quinine and no bird, squirrel, or mouse will plant, carry, or touch them. Nature appears to have forgotten to provide any other means for dispersing the seeds of this remarkable tree. When seeds are fully ripe, they drop away from the parent fruit--the cucumber--but the fall of each seed is arrested by a small thread which suspends it from one to three inches below the fruit. There the seeds hang, swinging and dangling in the wind. What part the threads play in the economy of nature is not apparent, unless their purpose is to expose the seeds to a chance of becoming entangled with the wings, feet, or feathers of flying birds, whereby they may be carried away and dropped in suitable places for growing. There can be no doubt that this happens occasionally, and constitutes one of the methods of seed dispersal. Others are transported by flowing water.

The chances seem to be greatly against the survival of the cucumber tree in competition with maples, birches, pines, and cottonwoods, whose winged seeds are wind-borne; or with oaks, hickories, and walnuts whose heavy, wingless nuts are planted hither and thither by accommodating squirrels which are intent only on providing for their own winter wants, but in reality are industrious and effective forest planters. Notwithstanding the disadvantages under which the cucumber tree is placed, it has managed to hold its ground in the forest during immense periods of time, and it seems to be as firmly established now as ever.

The leaves of this tree are from seven to ten inches long, and four to six wide. In autumn before they fall they turn a blotched yellow-brown color. The first severe frost brings them all down in a heap. At sunset the tree may be laden with leaves, and by the next noon all will be on the ground. They are so heavy that the wind does not move them far, and they drop in heaps beneath the branches. In color they resemble owl feathers, and the suggestion that comes to one’s mind, who happens to pass under a cucumber tree the morning following the first frost, is that during the night some prowler picked a roost of owls and scattered the feathers on the ground.

The range of cucumber extends from western New York to Alabama, following the Appalachian mountains; and westward to Illinois and Mississippi, appearing west of the Mississippi river in Arkansas. It occurs on low rocky slopes, the banks of mountain streams, and on rich bottom land. It is of largest size and is most abundant in the narrow valleys in eastern Tennessee and the western parts of the Carolinas. The tree is from two to four feet in diameter, and sixty to ninety feet high. The trunk is of good form for sawlogs. Among its local names are pointed-leaf magnolia, black lin, magnolia, and mountain magnolia.

The wood of cucumber resembles that of yellow poplar in appearance and in physical properties, except that it is ten per cent heavier than poplar. It usually passes for that wood at sawmill and factory. The Federal census credits it with less than a million feet a year as lumber. That is much too small. It is valuable and finds ready sale. Manufacturers of wooden pumps regard it as the best material for the bored logs. It is worked into interior finish for houses, flooring for cars, interior parts of furniture, woodenware, boxes and crates, slack cooperage, including veneer barrels.

The tree is planted for ornament in the northern states and Europe. The chief value lies in its large, green leaves and symmetrical crown. The red fruit adds to the tree’s attractiveness late in summer.