This section is from the book "The Gardener's Monthly And Horticulturist V22", by Thomas Meehan. See also: Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long.
Considerable confusion still exists in some quarters, it would seem, as to which of the two Asiatic Catalpas, now in general cultivation in this country, is Catalpa Ksempferi, and which is the Chinese C. Bungei. Of the two plants in question, one is a small tree 15 to 20 feet in height, with ovate leaves deeply heart-shaped at the base; small flowers and very slender pods. This plant flowers and ripens its seeds very freely. The other Catalpa, only known I believe in this country as a low wide-spreading bush, has narrow, long pointed leaves, wedge shaped at the base; this plant as yet shows no inclination to flower.
On the strength of the reference in De Can-dolle's Prodromus (Vol. ix p. 226) it is insisted (by the editor of the Gardener's Monthly) that the plant which, under the name of Ksempferi, is doubtfully referred to Catalpa bignonioides as to variety, is the dwarf plant with wedge-shaped leaves. De Candolle was, himself says, in doubt whether the Japanese plant was not C. bignonioides cultivated in Japan from America, or an indigenous species very similar to it. Bu as no one has ever seen an American Catalp: with leaves wedged-shaped at the base, De Can dolle could not have referred a plant with leave: markedly so shaped to C. bignonioides. He refers too, the plant in question to the excellent figun on page 841 of Kaempfer's Amenitales Exoticae which exactly represents the foliage, flower and fruit of the small flowered plant with cordate leaves now common in cultivation, and to which being found specifically distinct, Siebold and Zuccarini have properly given the name of Catalpa Kaempferi. See their Florae Japonicse familise Naturales, p. 480. The dwarf bushy plant is a form of Catalpa Bungei, perhaps of garden origin, the species which according to Bunge (Enum. pi. chin. p. 45) becomes a large tree, is probably not yet in cultivation in this country, although it is included in the catalogue of the Arboretum Seguzianum. For further references to the bibliography of Catalpa Ksempferi, see Tranchet and Savatier'a excellent enumeration of Japanese plants p. 326.
This view of the names properly belonging to these two plants is fully sustained by an examination in the Harvard Herbarium of several original Japanese specimens of C. Kaempferi, collected by Maximowicz, and others, and by one of Bunge's original specimens of C. Bungei, collected in northern China and labelled in his own hand-writing. This specimen agrees exactly in foliage with the dwarf C. Bungei of gardens.
[Feeling satisfied that Prof. Sargent must have had some different plant in his mind from that which we had, we have retained this article on hand till we could visit Cambridge, and see the plants and specimens there. We now find that Prof. Sargent is correct in his view that the dwarf form, looking like a huge currant bush, and with leaves and shoots exactly like the common Catalpa, and which for the past thirty years has been distributed from continental nurseries as C. Ksempferi, is not that species. There is no doubt but C. Ksempferi is the small tree which has been in many cases known as C. Bungei.
We were, however, quite right in supposing that this dwarf kind could not be the C. Bungei, as described by Prof. Sargent. It may be that the true C. Bungei is in this country. There is a plant under this name in the Cambridge garden, but it did not seem to the writer to correspond with a specimen in Dr. Gray's Herbarium, or to be different materially from what we have now to know as C. Kaempferi; and we feel that it is best to wait a little while longer before deciding on what cultivated plant, if any, is really C. Bungei.
So far as we have gone the only certain points gained are these: The small tree with long slender pods is Catalpa Kaempferi; the dwarf form, like a huge currant bush, often called C. Kaemp-feri, must be called the dwarf American Catalpa, or if one wants it in Latin, Catalpa bignonioides nana. C. Bungei is something else. - Ed. G. M].