Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

I love my DNA! I love your DNA! I love everybody’s DNA (Is that a double helix in your pocket or are you glad to see me?). It’s what makes each of us our own little traveling Freak Show. I have always been interested in genetic diversity when I think about it. I grew up in a family of 9 children. Alright, alright, I will tell you. I am 8 of 9. My parents both had essentially black hair in their youth, but the 9 offspring? Let me see – black, dirty blonde, black, dark brunette, black, auburn, brunette, coffee bean brown, dirty blonde. Can you tell which one is me? I swear in the 5th grade if someone said my hair was black I would say, “No, it’s coffee bean brown” (shut up Chad). I got it from a hair dye ad. It’s no wonder I was picked after the ugly girls for softball.

I also remember a picture of my oldest brother taken with one of those Bazooka Joe Bubble Gum cameras – I am so damn old and this is not the Joe of my youth. He was sitting out in the yard in jeans and a flannel shirt I think, about 8 probably. When I was about 6 I would cry because people would say it wasn’t me. I was a sensitive child and please remember that child still exists under the hard ass exterior you see today. My point being that at that age in our lives we looked so much alike it was unreal. Our differences are much more obvious now. Puberty was cruel to some of us. He has my mother’s fabulously thick hair. When I went to college I had the opportunity to study genetics a bit more. Not just in the regular appearance of it in many science based classes but in an actual genetics class. An entire semester devoted to the mysteries of DNA, miosis, and mitosis.

It was there that I learned the birth order of my siblings and I must be something very unusual as well. One of the things we covered in the class was probability. If you crossed a barred chicken with a blue chicken what was the chance of getting a red chicken (snowball in hell should be crossing your mind right now), that kind of thing. What I never did the math on was this. Nine children were born. Where I come from the number is not the unusual part, okay? Here’s the unusual part. The 4 girls were born first, then the 5 boys. Complete separation of the sexes. Fascinating.

Where was I going with this? Oh yea. Back on track. Genetic diversity. Horticulture. In my many years of living in Indiana one of the great joys of Spring remains seeing our redbuds start blooming. The redbud – Cercis canadensis – can be found all over central and southern Indiana, blooming a week or two before the more famous (and fussier) dogwoods – Cornus florida. In all my years of walking fields and woodlands and driving down countless roads I have never seen a truly different looking redbud. All those thousands of plants and only an occasional – “That might be pinker or slightly redder”. My friend Paul found one with yellow variegation in the leaves at a nursery. But to this day I have found nothing. Fortunately other people have. They have found a lot of diversity in redbuds, in flower color, leaf color, and plant form. I first learned of these in the woody plant courses at Purdue. I wanted them all. They were very rare in the nursery world in truth. The last few years they have finally started becoming available widely. Which is most fortunate because that’s when we began the museum expansion and we had lots of new landscape to plant – to plant with redbuds.

We now have 11 cultivars of Cercis canadensis on site, plus 2 other species. The cultivars vary from white to true pink to red. Leaf colors come in purple, green and white variegated, and chartreuse. One is a beautiful weeping form. And just to make life easy for all, virtually all can be seen by taking a walk from the museum’s Efroymson Entrance to the Garden for Everyone and back re-entering the museum on the backside of the Deer Zink Pavilion.

At the main entrance you will find a planting of 5 ‘Appalachian Red’ to the right as you exit the building. Cross the Sutphin Mall to the Garden for Everyone. As you enter on the left will be 3 small plants of ‘Silver Cloud’, a green and white variegated redbud. It tends to remain smaller than purely green-leafed forms. Just past there on the left again is a ‘Little Woody’, a more dwarf cultivar. Then you are looking right at our beautiful old tree with the large bloom masses on the limbs of the tree. This is called cauliflowery because of its obvious resemblance to cauliflower.

Walk on out of GFE and turn left. Before you get to the sidewalk taking you back into the garden is ‘Forest Pansy’, the redbud with purple leaves and slightly darker than normal flowers.

Continue along the outside sidewalk and you find ‘Appalahian Red’ again, ‘Tennessee Pink’ and ‘Wither’s Pink Charm’. I’m no longer sure which is which in these photos but both are good pinks.

Next you will see ‘Alba’.

On the right just beyond is Cercis chinensis ‘Don Egolf’ blooming so heavy it’s almost stupid.

You will see a couple more ‘Tennessee Pink’ on the right but look ahead and you see the palest pink of ‘Pauline Lily’.

Then there is the other species we have, the glossy leathery leafed Cercis reniformis represented by the cultivar ‘Oklahoma’. Finally as you enter Deer Zink there is ‘Covey’, known in the trade as Lavender TwistTM. This is the best weeping form available.

My personal favorite at this time is ‘Hearts of Gold’. I have it in my front yard at home and eventually we will find a place for it here.

Well, I know that was a lot of plants coming at you fast but I feel I didn’t even complete my mission of bringing you more horticulture. I will mention quickly that breeders are working to cross all these different leaf, flower, and growth forms to bring us even more genetic diversity – and beauty for our gardens. Fiddle-dee-dee. I didn’t touch on magnolias for heaven’s sake. So many flowering trees it gives me the vapors sometimes. I wonder if I inherited that from some ancestor? Was that Aunt Myrtle or Aunt Stella that used to…….

• Tags: bazooka joe, Cercis canadensis, flowering trees, Horticulture, ima, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Irvin Etienne, redbud, Spring

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Horticulture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.