I stopped to stare at some buckets of flowers at a recent farmers’ market. The white flowers, their throats speckled purple and yellow and grouped together on stalks like a candelabra, looked almost like orchids. But there’s no orchid that showy.

The flowers were not orchids, of course. I stared and scratched my head, and then was embarrassed when the farmer told me they were: catalpa flowers.

Catalpa has a lot going for it besides beautiful flowers. It tolerates all sorts of growing conditions: heat, cold, wet soils, dry soils, pollution, sun and shade.

Catalpa’s leaves, as well as its flowers, evoke the tropics. The leaves are large, up to about a foot long, and heart-shaped.

It’s a wonder that more people don’t plant catalpa trees. One reason is that catalpa can be a big tree, and a behemoth 75 or 100 feet tall and half that width is too large for many yards.

The main reason people don’t plant catalpas is because the trees are considered messy. Those large leaves look dramatic hanging on the branches but once they drop ... well, they’re not as attractive flopped down on a lawn.

And then there are the fruits. Catalpa is also known as Indian Pipe or Indian Stogie for the foot-long, half-inch-wide brown fruits that dangle in profusion from the stems. They drop in autumn and winter, and some people object to those stogies on their lawn.

I do have beefs, all relatively minor, against my catalpa tree. The first is that catalpas leaf out late in spring so that, for a time in spring when just about every other plant is green, catalpa appears to be dead. Its bare branches do get to show off how thick, craggy and muscular they are, a look I appreciate more in winter than in spring.

Second, by late summer the leaves usually pick up a thin, sooty covering, the result of a superficial fungus living on aphid honeydew and otherwise doing the tree little harm.

And third, in autumn the leaves do nothing more than fall, never turning anything more than a washed-out green color.

Still, catalpas are well worth planting in the right place, which means a large yard and a portion of lawn that is not manicured, unless you enjoy raking. Catalpas are not long-lived, but they’re fast-growing and precocious. Once cut down, their soft wood carves and turns well.