Catalpa facts
Curious about catalpas? They are not a graceful tree, not at all handsome in winter, most would say. They have been grown on farms, mostly in the past, for making fence posts. Their seed pods are inedible to almost all animals, so it is thought that, like some other trees such as osage orange, they were eaten by megafauna like gomphotheres and ground sloths in the Pleistocene. This is backed up by the fact that their range does not seem to spread naturally in present times, making it likely that they were spread in the past by large mammals that moved around a lot. These days they are admired for their flowers and sometimes grown for their most common pest, a caterpillar that is used as bait.
Oh, yes, and as @shellfoo mentions, the leaves are kind of heart-shaped!