Crown Hill’s Colorful New Tree Map and Tour
We’ve created a new self-guided Tree Tour! Crown Hill’s beautiful urban forest is the largest greenspace inside the I-465 beltway and is comprised of thousands of trees, 4,100 of which have been inventoried. For our new Tree Tour, we’ve tagged 52 trees with bright yellow signs that include their common and scientific names. They’re also featured on our new color tree map!
A few trees included on our new tour are a group of three Dawn Redwoods (tag #3 on Sec. 103), an ancient tree that lived among the dinosaurs and was thought to have been extinct for millions of years, only to be rediscovered in China in 1944. The Dawn Redwood is one of two deciduous conifers featured on our tour, the other being a Larch (tag #24 on Sec. 28). Larch trees thrive in cooler and moist northern climates and can often be found growing in bogs. Central Indiana is most likely its southernmost growing range. Unlike other conifers, the needles/leaves on the Larch look like little fireworks exploding from all over the tree. Rather than being an evergreen, deciduous conifers shed their soft feathery needles/leaves after they turn color in the fall.
Another beautiful group of trees tagged together are three Tricolor Beech trees (tag #35 on Sec. 87, across from the Final Finish Line). Their unusual summer pink and cream leaves are often confused with colorful spring blossoms. We’ve included two American Elm trees (tag #11 on Sec. 25, and tag #31 on Sec. 2) on our tour because the first is a magnificent specimen with a huge canopy and the other is one of three located on the lot of Robert Hanna Jr. (1786-1858), a signer of Indiana’s Constitution in 1816, which was crafted beneath a mammoth American Elm in Corydon, IN, our state’s first capital. The small three elms on Hanna’s lot were planted in June 2016 in memory of the “Constitutional Elm” tree that succumbed to Dutch Elm disease in 1925.
Located across the street from the large American Elm is a limestone tree trunk monument for William McCoy (tag #10 on Sec. 31). Mr. McCoy (1853-1893) was an African American appointed by President Benjamin Harrison as the U.S. Ambassador to Liberia in 1892. We included one of our many tree trunk monuments on the tree tour because they’re very unique and full of symbolism. Located on the next section to the south and on the same section as the Dawn Redwoods is a stunning pink flowering Crabapple (tag #6 on Sec. 103) — a must-see in the spring and one of several beautiful flowering trees on our tour.
Visit Crown Hill and see all 52 trees featured on our new tour! The tour can be done on foot, by car or by bicycle.
Our beautiful new color tree maps are available for free at the cemetery and funeral home office, in the box outside the Waiting Station’s front door, and are also available for download from our website.
