Phipps Opens Indian Tropical Forest Exhibit

Transcript

DUNIGAN: Hi, my name's Ben Dunigan, Assistant Curator of Horticulture at Phipps Conservatory

MELINO: And I'm Jordyn Melino, exhibit coordinator here at Phipps.

DUNIGAN: As you walk into the tropical forest, you're entering what we're calling the floral entrance overlook. There you have some of the plants that would typically greet someone who is visiting a home in India. Something like... holy basil is always found at the entrance of homes. And it will be here as well. Traveling down, you'd continue into the deck and plateau, which is a large area in southern India just past the western Ghats mountain range and it's more of a dryer, scrub forest. Still a tropical forest, but certainly there will be Montaigne forests, bamboo meadows, alpine forests, and fern forests. And each of those areas are designated into certain sections so you'll have a different feel even as you progress 20 or 30 feet down the path....

MELINO: So this is more of a representation of all of India. Ben and I traveled to, I think it was about 10 different cities in South India, so we saw a lot while we were down there... We did a lot of research on the Himalayas up north and the Western Ghats down and the south, and recreated the ecosystems here.

DUNIGAN: There's eight different species of jasmine in this forest. Here we're looking at the jasmine robusta, or a robust jasmine. It has beautiful little star like white flowers, kind of almost looks like snowflakes. Very fragrant. Some of your listeners may know how fragrant jasmine can be, and in designing this exhibit, I tried to make particular efforts to ensure that there would be some type of fragrance year round...
(birds begin to chirp in background)

These are recordings of an Asian jungle. It is part of the experience here at Phipps is to try to engage as many senses as possible. I just mentioned the smell of the jasmine. Of course, there will be beautiful flowers for one to gaze upon. But of course, the audible sense is something that really let people really feel like they're surrounded in the jungles of Asia.

MELINO: So what made this exhibit more interesting as compared to the two other tropical forests we've had here is the amount of community involvement in the design process. So Pittsburgh has a very large Indian community, and we were able to take advantage of that. We created a task force and invited keys members of the Indian community to join us... So we've gathered a lot of their valuable input and integrated it into the exhibit... Ben and I visited both of the Hindu temples here in Pittsburgh... People at those temples were extremely helpful in putting together this display.

(Recorded birds chirping)

OUTCUE: That was Kate Malongowski....



1879 Colocasia, believed to be one of the earliest cultivated plants, line the misty stream.

1883. Conservation interpretive literature at Phipps' Tropical India exhibit.


1900: Grapette ground orchid cultivar.

1901: Citrus cooler ground orchid cultivar