Gardening by Mistake

The Island Garden is so lovely. It has a wonderful rock wall, over which many plants drape and decorate and from which others grow in the cracks.This is the inside of the path.

The other side is bordered by the pond and pots of plants decorating the walkways. The pond itself has been divided into two areas: the wider pond (more like a small lake) and then an area separated off which contains many beautiful aquatic plants and some statuaries. In the picture below and left you can see where the aquatic part of the garden is walled off and higher than the rest of the pond.

These are partial views of the Island Garden from across the wider pond, taken from the Woodland Garden:

From the area not visible in these pictures:

If you look closely you can see the edge that separates this part of the pond from the greater body (below, right). It is in this smaller area that the statues and aquatic plants are located.

A few other aquatic plants. I’m guessing they are lotus, but I didn’t take note of the names since I don’t have a water garden. I just love to look at them. I think they are beautiful.

Further along the Island Garden, I came across a plant that is new to me: Seseli gumiferum, commonly known as Moon Carrot. I found it to be intriguing, although I have no plans to grow it in my own garden.

This is a close-up of just one group of flowers. So tiny!

This plant is a mystery plant for me. I double-checked when at Powell Gardens again a few days ago. It is in a pot with no identifying information. The plant itself is an oddity but the flowers just fascinate me. I love the color of them. You can see the branch between the two flowers and behind as well. The plant was little more than inch-thick sticks with those blooms on them.

The Island Garden at Powell Gardens is tied with their perennial garden as my favorite garden. I only wish it were larger!

These are views as we walked from the North Garden (with the fountain) to the Island Garden. The island garden is, not surprisingly, surrounded on two sides by the pond. (It’s so large calling it a pond seems wrong to me). Across from it is the Woodland Garden and the Perennial Garden.

Another of the sculptures along the way.

This is the Island Garden from the vantage point of the other side of the pond, in the Woodland Garden area.

One of the first plants I saw on the Island Garden was this. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it is. The next time I’m there (probably next weekend for the Butterfly Festival), I intend to look for a plant identification marker. The second picture is a close-up of the flowers on this plant.

One of the features that makes the Island Garden so interesting, to me, is its rock wall garden. The plant above was growing on that, as are many other plants. I never expected to see lavender growing on a rock wall!

A close-up of a lavender wand.

A bit of whimsical garden art.

A close-up of another plant growing from the rock wall.

Here’s that same plant, growing next to nepeta.

Also from my Monday visit to Powell Gardens are these pictures of the meadow garden and of what they call the rock and waterfall garden. I refer to it here as the woodland garden.

I would have called the meadow garden a prairie instead, but perhaps I’m showing my ignorance there. It’s possible there is some reason that it is more accurate to call it a meadow rather than a prairie. Regardless, it is a wide-open area with tall grasses and native prairie plants.

This picture includes the Marjorie Powell Allen Chapel in the distance.

As we walked through the meadow garden headed toward the woodland garden, we passed two more sculptures and the pond.

I didn’t take many pictures in the woodland garden. I like the garden a good deal but it is fairly dark and, being a woodland garden, lacking many brightly colored flowers. That is, with one notable exception: this is where the 700 azaleas bloom in the spring.

Entering the woodland garden.

One of the streams in the woodland garden.

Following are some pictures of the garden from May, 2005.

Chances are you haven’t heard of or visited Powell Gardens. I’m going to show you some of what you’ve been missing!

Powell Gardens sits upon a 915-acre tract of land just east of the Kansas City metro. There are many small gardens making up Powell Gardens. The three acre perennial garden contains more than 1,200 perennial cultivars. There is a children’s garden which highlights edible plants. A new, much larger children’s garden is currently being built. There is a two acre Island Garden, a Rock and Waterfall garden which contains woodlands and two streams, and a 3.5 mile nature trail. The newest garden is the Fountain Garden, a 1.5 acre garden featuring a beautiful fountain kids are invited to play in as well as another water feature. A butterfly garden surrounds this.

Powell Gardens is a bargain, too. For just $60, my husband and 2 kids and I can visit as often as we want for a year. Even better, this membership allows us to visit many other botanical gardens either free or at reduced rates. (Last summer DH and I visited the Missouri Botanical Gardens and the free admission made out visit all the more enjoyable). We’ll be headed back very soon to enjoy their annual butterfly festival.

I’m blessed to live where I can visit not only Powell Gardens but also the Missouri Botanical Gardens across the state, in St. Louis. The Missouri Botanical Gardens are rated as one of the top 10 in the world, and it’s easy to see why when you visit. For my money, though, I prefer Powell Gardens.

At Powell Gardens I can photograph to my heart’s content. And today that was 350 pictures! I am not going to inflict all of those on you, don’t worry! But because I have so many, even pared down, I’m going to break today’s visit into several posts.

The pictures in today’s post are from the newest garden: the Fountain Garden, which is to the north of the Visitor’s Center.

Leaving the Visitor’s Center, we approached the Fountain Garden.

This was my first time seeing the finished garden and I was blown away by. Last summer it was still under construction. The kids could play in the fountain, but the plants hadn’t been planted yet and much hardscaping was still going on. These are some pictures from May 2007:

These are some of the things we saw today on our way to the Fountain Garden:

In the Fountain Garden there is a second water feature, a stream of sorts. From the bottom, looking up:

The beginning of the water feature (below left). To the left of the terra cotta pot in the picture (right), is a water plant about to bloom. It’s a large bloom. This picture doesn’t convey that size very well.

Butterfly gardens surround the fountain itself.

This fountain is beautiful. My kids love to run through it and play in it, as the picture from last year shows.

A color combination I really liked in the planting bordering the fountain.

Also in the butterfly garden surrounding the fountain…

Callirhoe

DH’s sharp eyes saw this monarch butterfly chrysalis. In my recent post about the monarch caterpillar/butterfly, I was lamenting that I didn’t have a nice close-up of the chrysalis. Well, I still don’t have a macro lens, but I did get this. You can see the gold band that is always on the top and the gold “sparkles” around the bottom. There’s even a tiny droplet of water on this one.

Powell Gardens always has some interesting artwork or other exhibit as part of the different gardens. In the past there have been exhibits with giant bugs (bigger than adult men), dinosaurs (really big), and tree houses. Currently, the exhibit is “The Great African Sculpture Exhibit Chapungu: Nature, Man, and Myth.”

This was one of the sculptures near the Fountain Garden.