This beautiful ornamental has large heart shaped leaves that are almost tropical in appearance.  They can grow to 12 inches long and 8 inches wide, are thick and smooth on top and hairy on the bottom. It has showy white to purplish flowers that grow in erect pyramidal clusters at the ends of the twigs. The long seed pods can grow to 20 inches and give it its often dubbed name: Indian Bean Tree.

Called Catalpa by the Cherokees, the Latin speciosa was added by biologists to indicate its ornamentality.

It is a broad tree when grown in the open, distinctive with crooked trunk and picturesque irregularity.

Normally growing from 35 to 70 foot tall, with a trunk diameter of 10 to 20 inches, this tree will grow almost anywhere and under most all conditions.  It is an undemanding tree and one of the easiest to sprout.  In its natural range in the Ohio Valley, trees have been known to grow to 100 feet and five feet in diameter.

A deciduous tree, its leaves are purplish when young and have purplish veins on their undersides, attracting honeybees. The leaves are light yellowish-green in maturity.

Flowers bloom in early summer and are followed in autumn by the long conspicuous seedpods which mature as green capsules 10 to 20 inches long and about ½” thick.  The pods turn dark brown in winter, staying on the tree, and split open, liberating their flat seeds in early spring.

Bark is rather thin, grayish and vertically scaled.  Its wood is course grained and soft. Not strong, but durable in contact with the soil, it is most often used as fence posts in commercial application.