New Powell Gardens Butterfly Garden Opens Saturday

The new Powell Gardens Butterfly Garden officially opens to the public on Saturday, May 31, 10a.m. - 3p.m. We will have some of the best butterfly gardeners and enthusiasts on hand to help interpret the garden, give you tips on what to plant to attract butterflies and have some interesting butterflies and moths to see up close.

Matt Bunch, Horticulturist-Heartland Harvest Garden, puts some finishing touches to the garden. Matt is in charge of the new garden as it is an "Insectaries Garden" that will not only attract butterflies, but other important pollinators and beneficial insects as well. We all should never take for granted those fruits and vegetables we eat and that some necessary little critter pollinated those flowers for us so that we could partake of the luscious fruit. Also most insects are beneficials: the good bugs eat the bad bugs and only a small percentage are pests! You will see the beginnings to the Heartland Harvest Garden (our premier edible landscape and newest garden scheduled to open next year) to the west of the arbor above the butterfly garden beds.

Here is an overview of the garden looking south across its tiered beds toward the Visitor Center. There are four beds on the north and four beds on the south side of the Fountain Garden. The stonework ties it in beautifully with the Visitor Center -- come see, no photo can do the beautiful landscape justice.

A rainbow of flowers are in bloom in the new garden starting with red 'Tex Tuff Red' Verbena which is a tender perennial that will bloom all summer.

The garden has a strong theme of native plants including pink Pale Purple Coneflowers (Echinacea pallida).

Mexican Sunflowers (Tithonia rotundifolia) are an awesome annual to attract butterflies and hummingbirds.

The Ozark native Yellow Wild Indigo (Baptisia sphaerocarpa) becomes a premier garden perennial but is a good host (a plant which the caterpillars can eat) for the little Wild Indigo Duskywing butterfly.

Former Perennial Plant of the Year 'Walker's Low' Catmint is a stunning perennial in blue with nectar rich flowers produced nearly all season if it is sheared back in midsummer.

Pansies (Viola x witrockiana) are used in the garden as early season nectar plants but they are also good host plants for the Variegated Fritillary butterfly.

Single flowering zinnias like these 'Starbrite' Zinnias (Zinnia angustifolia) make great nectar plants. Remember many double flowers have no nectar in them.

So for all colors of the rainbow, there is a great butterfly and insect plant for your garden. Come see the new garden and get some ideas how to make your garden more GREEN by attracting forgotten pollinators and creating a balance of nature that will keep your use of pesticides to a minimum.

Mockoranges, Out of Fashion but not out of Style.

The pristine white flowers with a special, orange-blossom-like scent make the mockorange a staple of late spring flowers and fragrance in a garden. Mockoranges are currently out of fashion and much maligned by garden gurus but a season without them would be a miss!
Depicted are the flowers of the magnificent 'Snow Velvet' cultivar of the Western U.S. native mockorange (Philadelphus lewisii) "discovered" by Lewis & Clark.


Powell Gardens' Snow Velvet Mockorange can be seen below the wall south of the Cafe. It has the most showy blossoms of any of our mockoranges with a good scent too. It often has some repeat bloom through the summer.


We are lucky to display an heirloom Sweet Mockorange (Philadelphus coronarius) I obtained as a division from a shrub that is well more than 100 years old from a friend's farm near Decorah, Iowa. Sweet Mockorange was grown on many family farms across the Midwest and often persist near abandoned buildings to this day. They have the sweetest scent and bring back many fond memories. They also are a good nectar source for butterflies and insects.


The heirloom sweet mockorange is often blasted as a poor plant but this heirloom has full flowers of freshest fragrance. It makes a huge vase or fountain shaped shrub. Look for this plant south of the Visitor Center, another one is on the Island Garden.

We have other mockoranges on the grounds but none are as magnificent as these two. The cultivar 'Innocence' in the Perennial Garden's "white garden" may have the sweetest scent but is a weaker grower with marbled variegation to the leaves. The cultivar 'Belle Etoile' (on the upper edge of the Perennial Garden) is currently just budded and has purplish centers to richly fragrant blooms. There is one Missouri native species; just entering the state in its southwesternmost corner: the Downy Mockorange (Philadelphus pubescens). The Mockoranges are a taxonomist's nightmare and often defy identification to species with lots of regional variability. Who cares what they are called, enjoy their special fragrance and exquisite white flowers.

Roses, Our National Flower, Shine at Powell Gardens in 2008

The wonderfully moist and cooler-than-normal spring have allowed our roses to be more floriferous than ever! Powell Gardens may not have a rose garden but roses are used in the landscape throughout the grounds. We grow only disease-resistant, low maintenance varieties appropriate for each landscape setting. Enjoy the following sampling of Powell Gardens' roses:

The rugosa rose 'Frau Dagmar Hartopp' is a compact shrub rose with masses of single pink flowers. It is very disease resistant. Look for these masses on the meadow side of the east bridge of the Island Garden.


A closeup of 'Frau Dagmar Hartopp' rose reveals flowers reminiscent of pink dogwoods. They have a delightful rugosa rose scent and will continue to bloom (though more sparingly) until fall. The later season flowers produce fine red hips that are winter ornament or can be used for jelly and teas rich in vitamin C.


Our favorite red landscape rose is 'Champlain' a hybrid rose from the Morden Experiment Station in Manitoba. It is very disease resistant, a great red, and both heat and cold tolerant. This shot was taken in the courtyard on the north side of the Visitor Center. We also have Champlain rose near the Visitor Center trolley stop and on the Island Garden.


Another wonderful Morden rose is 'Morden Centennial' with excellent double pink blooms. Others in the series include 'Morden Blush' (blush pink), 'Morden Fireglow' (orange-red) and 'Winnipeg Parks' (bright pink) all of which are excellent in the Kansas City climate.


The late Dr. Buck from Iowa State University also has a series of hybrid roses that do wonderfully here. Our favorite is 'Distant Drums' with the unique lavender-mauve-honey blend of colors. We have used this rose extensively in the Fountain Garden where it currently is in full bloom (depicted).


A closeup of 'Distant Drums' roses.


The rose 'Carefree Sunshine' is a wonderful yellow and is really quite sincerely carefree! We used it near the Fountain Garden's centerpiece where we knew spray and mist would not mire its completely disease resistant foliage. It is a tall growing rose however and can be used as a climber.


The old fashioned climbing rose 'Zephirine Drouhin' is also in bloom and has thornless canes! Look for a pair of these climbers on the walls on either side of the entrance to the courtyard at the north end of the Visitor Center.

Powell Gardens has many landscape roses currently in bud and bloom and they all enrich the visitor experience. Thirty-five varieties will be planted in the Heartland Harvest Garden because roses are edible flowers and provide vitamin C rich fruit. They are good companions to grapes and always used in vineyards as the "canaries in the mineshaft" to make sure conditions are good for the grapes.
New hybrid roses continue to arrive on the market and many of the newbies are shockingly beautiful and amazingly disease resistant. The hybridizers are finally breeding some fragrance back into the flowers too!