Think twice before you plant a catalpa tree next to your driveway. Once it’s mature and you’ve lived with it for a few seasons, you may find yourself chaining it to the back of the car to rip it out of the ground.
There’s a lot to love about the catalpa. It pushes out fragrant blooms in summer, when most other trees are simply covered with foliage. It also has impressively large leaves, similar to a tropical plant, which is rare for something that can survive northern winters. In a winter landscape, the long, beanlike seed pods add a lot of visual interest.
Unfortunately, the darn things are a real mess. I learned this when I had the misfortune of getting stuck with a parking space beneath one. For most of the year, the catalpa was a quiet enough neighbor. This particular tree had developed branches in a lovely spiral pattern, making it look like a staircase of branches heading toward its tip. The flowers were a welcome enough sight, and the development of the beans was nice to watch.
Then, it started to drip. And drip. And drip. Catalpas generate a ton of sap in late summer and early autumn, mostly from the time the seed pods reach maturity until the time the leaves drop. This sap falls like rain throughout the day and night, leaving discolored spots on a car’s paint that attract every loose bit of pollen and dust in the area. The gunk on the windshield resisted everything but a trip through the car wash, a place I found myself visiting every other day for several weeks until the tree mercifully shut off its sap spigot.
It’s a lovely tree, but I’ll never park under it again. If you want one for your yard, be ready for the sap storm and keep it far away from the driveway.
We have a catalpa tree in front of our house in chicago. Parking is at a premium here and my husband will not park in the front because of the sap storms. Does your car get full of flies due to the sap? The tree has to be killed, but how?