The first plants that make me think along these lines are the hostas. Hostas as many of you know are THE perennial foliage plant. Who knows how many amateur breeders are out there, spreading pollen from flower to flower in hopes of creating the next “great one”. The more advanced are using irradiation on seeds. Plus they mutate more than fruit flies living at Chernobyl. There are probably 20 million cultivars. Blue ones. Yellow ones. Green and white ones. Green and yellow ones. Blue and white ones. Blue and yellow ones. Blue, green, and white ones. Blue, green, and yellow ones. Green ones. Giant ones. Miniature ones. Some want more shade. Some want more sun. But very few are grown for their flowers. In fact many look much better if you deadhead them while in bud. But some of them, some of them you grow for the flowers. One of my favorites is the August lily, Hosta plantaginea ‘Grandiflora, with its giant white flowers smelling sweeter than a French whore in Casablanca on Saturday night.

The bright green foliage is reasonably sun tolerant also. This antique favorite is a must have for an evening garden and hard to do without in any garden. This plant has been used in the creation of several hostas with delightfully scented blooms. Another plain green hosta, this time a darker green, that I like for the flowers is Hosta clausa.

The blooms never open but remain in a beautiful urn shape. The flowering stems are also bright magenta/purple. I would love to see someone working in a cross of this one with H. plantaginea. Can you imagine the purple color of clausa with the bloom size and fragrance of plantaginea?  Oooo la la (in keeping with the French whore theme). An added bonus with clausa is it spreads by runners so you could have a very nice groundcover as well. Both plants are great cut flowers too.

My love of tropicals causes me much angst, teeth gnashing, fret, and worry as the forecast temperatures drop closer and closer to that all important point of no return – frost. Frost, the very word can cause expletives to fall out of my mouth faster than the leaves off the trees. I just need one more week to get the house organized to handle the sudden onslaught of tropical immigrants.  One more week-end to wash the bugs off before the plants come inside. One more day to label the dahlias before the frost makes them all look like the same pile of black mush. One more hour of daylight so I can dig the really tender stuff that can’t even take a light frost. It’s hell. And every year I say I will do less but then this one is just too pretty and that one has a really good mature structure and the other one was so hard to find and….. Get the picture?

But there is one tropical I can leave out in the garden, a banana no less. Musa basjoo, the Japanese fiber banana, or more simply stated, the hardy banana. In truth it is not the only banana that is rated as a zone 5 plant but it is the most commonly available. I’ve only attempted one other species to no avail. Musa basjoo has survived in my friend Terry’s garden on the Southside for 5 years. Usually the largest stalk from the previous year rots out over winter but the surrounding smaller growing points come back and create a very nice clump. Ours at the IMA has been in the ground 2 years. It admittedly is planted in a very protected site between the greenhouses.

Mine at home went in the ground in late May this year but is already nearly 10 feet tall with 3 new stalks 4 to 6 feet tall.

I will mulch heavily come freezing weather. I have a second one that went in much later and in more shade with less moisture. It doesn’t look as promising for survival. I may dig it and put it in the basement and try again next year. See what I mean? There’s another one to be dug. The big advantage of course is that it can be overwintered dormant. Oh, and I bought 2 in August on super sale at Lowe’s for $3.50 each. I just moved them to bigger pots instead of putting them in the ground. That’s 2 more to the basement. Oh yea, I’m cutting way back this year.

In many ways museums have been required to wear many hats for a while now. They have found themselves in precarious places, needing to get a piece of that proverbial cash pie, necessitating competition with movies, sporting events, zoos and other, much flashier leisure time attractions. This unfamiliar and uncomfortable competition led to horrible things like the invention of the word “edu-tainment.” As a museum educator turned new media super-star I have seen this scenario from a couple of angles. One was the need to tie everything a museum did to some educational goal that had to do with something more obviously valuable than “art.” Art and science, art and math: boy, were art museums thankful for da Vinci! Of course, for many of us, a more enlightened 21^st century point of view has evolved and now we are comfortable asserting that art is valuable, all by itself. Learning about art and how people make it is a worthwhile endeavor for every man, woman and child, and sometimes by chance, or even on purpose, art actually relates to those other things that kids learn in school.

But even after this realization, we are still multi-tasking, still trying to find a variety of angles that will allow us to pitch our work to the world. You’ve read IMA blog posts about social networking, seen us on iTunes U, and we have engaged in other technological exploits. These are examples of how IMA is trying to insert itself into the lives of unsuspecting internet users all over the world by using the same tools gimmicky (and successful) companies use. As a member of the new media team, I can honestly say that all we do is multi-task, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. But it is definitely a different variety of juggling from the previous thematic exploits of many museums. These days we look at an exhibition, a program, a topic and think about all the potential audiences and ask, who are they really and what do we want them to know? Why would they care about Roman art, or contemporary art or any kind of art? In order to get answers that matter, new media talks to marketing and both of them talk to education and curatorial reps. We struggle to keep up with all this communicating, but we work really hard at it in the hopes that if we can pull it all together we might find the best way to tell you about what we’re all doing at IMA. Thus we blog, maintain a Facebook page, create web content, edit videos, and we have those galleries full of art, too. We have trouble figuring it all out and keeping it all straight. What is marketing’s job? What does new media do exactly? How should we divide it all up? The short answer, I think, is we shouldn’t. Instead we should do what we’ve been doing, rolling with the punches, talking a lot and trying not to be fussy about who does what until someone does nothing. Daniel is best at this, but I am trying hard to get up to speed.

Under Daniel’s leadership we (the royal we) have taken these ideas to heart, as a cross-departmental team, and created firm plans with great ambition that combine the best of many worlds. Collaboration on many levels is the thing that makes us genre-defying. You might find new media poking around in conservation (supervised and with permission, of course) or in the greenhouse shooting a video about that. We work with education to coordinate video for guest lecturers and talk to artists when they visit IMA thanks to tip-offs from the contemporary department. All of this internal networking results in all the stuff you see from us on the web.

Now that technology has a hold on all of us, it is essential that museums understand how to harness it. And IMA is working hard. Watch for some big things this year. We might still be students in some regard, but at least we show up for class. So when 2008 wraps, don’t be surprised to find that IMA is listed among all the other genre-defying juggernauts out there. And if we’re not…well, then you’re not reading the right blogs.

P.S. – I tried really hard to work in a reference to Aerosmith and RUN DMC being genre-defying, and I am really sad I couldn’t, thus the existence of this pathetic add-on.