These photos of catalpas in bloom come from my friend Albert Rose. He lives in Wheat Ridge, and we've discovered many beautiful catalpas in our perigrinations around his hometown. He was in downtown Denver, Capitol Hill and came upon a number of pretty spectacular blossoming trees. This is a reminder----it's early this year, by about 3 weeks for the catalpas, so make sure you get out to one of these blooming wonders and collect some of the fallen flowers, examine their orchid-like delicacy and amazing shape and inhale the fragrance. The blossoms never last after they're taken from the tree, so it's best to treat them like the gigantic bouquet they really are! Living in this semi-arid desert climate, it's a miraculous time for us, to be able to touch in to a tree that is so utterly fecund and tropical with it's huge numbers of flower spires and it's electric green heart shaped leaves. The tree looks like it belongs in the Amazon or somewhere in Indonesia. It's worth a couple minutes of your day to find a suitable flowering catalpa and walk around it and see it from as many angle as possible. This is particularly satisfying with giants like the one on the south side of Arapahoe just east of 17th St in Boulder, a true forest giant. I'm sure this tree was one of the first trees planted by the early settlers, and to go visit it is to get a direct connection to more than a century of weather and human activity in the Boulder Creek floodplain. This will only last another week or two, so good luck in practicing some flowering catalpa gazing while they're at their peak!
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