We had the opportunity to visit Powell Gardens in Kingsville, Missouri. Powell Gardens are beautiful, enormous non-profit botanical gardens with a large variety of gardens including a Children’s Garden. They are there for fun, education, and community. What did we experience at Powell Gardens?
Plants
Powell Gardens gives visitors a wonderful introduction to the prairie, a basic ecosystem in the American Midwest. They’re also home to the Midwest Center for Regenerative Agriculture. Naturally, they have plenty of plants to admire and learn about.
This is the beautiful Western Columbine.
Here we see foxgloves and zinnias.
These bold beauties are calendulas.
This is a peony.
We like to admire flowers, smell them, and think about which ones we might want to add to our own gardens. But there’s more you can do in a public garden full of flowers. Sketch them, find out what people have used them for, or learn about flowers with our Flower Study Guide.
For example, peonies and calendula are both edible and used for making tea, People have made salves from calendula. Foxglove and Columbine, on the other hand, can be poisonous and should never be eaten. Foxglove is the source of digitalis, an important heart medication, but it must be prepared in a laboratory.
Art
Powell Gardens has changing public art exhibits. This combination of glass, water, and plants was one of our favorites.
When we visited, there was a special outdoor exhibit along the path showing new interpretations of traditional quilting designs.
They used a variety of media. We spent a lot of time looking at them and thinking about them. This is one of the purposes of art.
Another installation that combined water and art with nature was this lotus exhibit.
Tea
We attended a tea party at Powell Gardens.
The menu included traditional teatime treats like scones and cucumber sandwiches as well as caprese salad, macarons, and croissants.
Why not plan your own tea party? Tea parties go very well with gardens.
Prairie
We had a chance to learn about the prairie. Prairies are one of the most important, and most underappreciated, ecosystems in North America. They shape climate, support biodiversity, and anchor human economies, even when they’re reduced to scattered remnants between highways and farm fields.
At their core, prairies are grasslands dominated by deep‑rooted plants which help prevent erosion. Before European settlement, vast prairie regions absorbed and stored enormous amounts of carbon in their soils; even now, intact prairies function as quiet carbon sinks, reducing greenhouse gases and buffering climate change. Their sponge‑like soils also hold water during storms and slowly release it, cutting down on flooding and helping to recharge aquifers. Powell Gardens shares the Ozark Aquifer with our home state.
Prairies are biodiversity engines. They host a wide range of species: grasses and wildflowers, pollinators such as bees and butterflies, ground‑nesting birds, small mammals, and predators that depend on that web of life. Many species are specialized to prairie conditions and cannot easily survive elsewhere. As prairies vanish, those plants and animals face local extinction, weakening the overall resilience of regional ecosystems.
Fertile prairie soils helped make the Great Plains an agricultural powerhouse, though heavy plowing and monoculture farming largely erased native prairie and degraded the land. Restoring even small patches of prairie can improve soil health, reduce the need for chemical fertiliziers and pesticides, and provide habitat along field edges or in conservation reserves.
Prairies have always been important to the Midwest, from Native American homelands and hunting grounds to Midwestern farms and fields. Learn more about the bison, the large mammals of the prairie.
https://www.myfreshplans.com/2016/08/bison-lesson-plans/
