Fenway Park Golden Ivy is a fabulous, deciduous, Asian native vine for covering buildings, fences, or the belongings of sloppy neighbors. On the way to a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park in 1988, now-retired Arnold Arboretum Research Scientist, Peter Del Tredici, spotted a golden mutation on a Boston Ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata), growing on an apartment building wall, a couple of blocks from the stadium. Peter was able to secure cuttings, and later get the Red Sox to allow him to name it Parthenocissus ‘Fenway Park’.
We have grown it at JLBG for over 30 years, it’s never failed to perform, and it’s never misbehaved. Below is our photo of it in the garden this week, and below that is Peter’s original photo of the building where it was discovered.
It never ceases to amaze me that when I look at something like shown in the bottom photo, I would ask myself ‘What went wrong there?”. Whereas someone else would see a mutation with horticultural value.
Mutations are similar to cancers…cell divisions gone awry. Nothing in nature occurs at a 100% identical rate, so mutations are a natural part of evolution. Some mutations have value that we view as good, and others, not so much.