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Taxonomy & Paulownia Trees

Although native to China and Southeast Asia, the paulownia tree has become a common ornamental in the U.S. The tree grows to a height of 40 to 50 feet and can be found growing in warmer parts of the country, especially the Southeast, where sometimes it is considered an invasive plant. To a plant taxonomist, the tree shows some similarities to the teak, olive, lilac or ash trees.

Kingdom and Phylum
- Paulownia trees are part of the plant kingdom, which in the current scheme of biological classification includes multicellular organisms that contain chlorophyll and are able to use the sun's energy to manufacture plant sugars. More importantly, this tree is considered part of the phylum angiosperms, which consists of vascular green plants that undergo seed reproduction after fertilization of its female flower with pollen. Flowering plants are further divided into two large groupings known as dicots and monocots. This classification refers to the young shoot that first emerges from a mature seed. The first leaves of the new plant are called cotyledons, as the plant will have either one (monocot) or two (dicot). The paulownia tree falls into the latter group.
Order
- Once a plant botanist has established that a flowering plant is a monocot or dicot, the next step would be to assign the plant to an order. Orders are large grouping of plants. Once order is identified, the next step of identifying the family can be accomplished with a greater ease.
  
  The paulownia tree belongs to the Lamiales order, which includes 23 families altogether. This order includes both herbaceous and woody plants, where many have flowers with a fused and bisymmetric corolla.
Family
- The families of the plant order Lamiales include the mints, verbenas, figworts, African violets and olive families. The princess tree belongs in the Paulowniaceae family, a small group with only one genus, Paulownia. However, sometimes this genus is included with the figwort family. This use of two families for one type of tree underscores how plant taxonomy is changing today. Where once botanists looked almost solely at the physical characteristics of each sample, nowadays plant biochemistry also plays a role in classifying green plants.
Genus
- Actual species of this plant range anywhere from six to 17 depending on which taxonomy source you are using. The genus was named in the honor of Queen Anne Pavlovna, a Dutch royal figure, who lived during the 1800s and was daughter to a Russian Czar. This reference also explains how the tree became known as the "princess tree." Several species of the paulownia are grown and cultivated in the U.S.

Nature