Horan’s new book Seeds: One Man’s Serendipitous Journey to Find the Trees That Inspired Famous American Writers from Faulkner to Kerouac, Welty to Wharton can be read as a collection of short stories. Pick your favorite literary figure and read about his or her tree(s). (I wish one could do the reverse: pick a tree and read about the writer(s) it inspired.) Image: Cover of Seeds by Richard Horan ( source ) By the way, Horan includes non-writers like Muhammad Ali. Growing in the yard of Ali’s childhood home in Louisville, Kentucky is a catalpa. Ali’s childhood home was exactly halfway down, on the right. There was only one house on that side of the road with a big tree out front. Guess whose it was?....Catalpas have the largest leaves of any tree in North America—about the size of a standard sheet of paper and shaped exactly like a heart. The tree looked to be about seventy-five years old, more broad than tall, with hundreds of engine-oil-brown bean pods dangling from i