Powell Gardens, Kansas City's botanical garden, is a botanical garden in Kingsville, Missouri, United States, east of Kansas City. It features 6,000 varieties of plants, with 225,000 plants in seasonal displays, and is open to the public, for a fee, during daylight hours.
The garden dates to 1948, when the land was purchased by George E. Powell, Sr. Since then, the site has been a dairy farm, a Boy Scout camp, an agricultural and natural resource center, and since 1988, a botanical garden.
Each year, the conservatory located in the Visitor Education Center is transformed into a tropical rainforest in order to house spring and summer butterfly exhibits. Blue morpho butterflies are featured along with others, including paper kite butterflies.
Powell Gardens hosts Missouri Barn Dinners every year, beginning in late spring. Held in the Missouri Barn, these dinners feature multi-course meals prepared by local chefs who are able to source many of their ingredients from the Heartland Harvest Garden. This series has featured chefs from notable Kansas City restaurants including República, Lidia's Kansas City, and others.
Powell Gardens hosts special exhibits each summer that are supplemented by a schedule of related special events and activities. Notable exhibits include:
- In 2001, Big Bugs! featured giant, lifelike bug sculptures, 100 times their normal size, scattered across the landscape. It included three ants that weighed 700 pounds each and were 25 feet long. The exhibit also featured a 1,200-pound female praying mantis, a 50-pound spider, and a 100-pound damselfly.
- In 2008, Chapungu - The Great African Sculpture Exhibit, featured 54 monumental stone sculptures. Visitors could watch master stone carvers at work in the gardens, and attend stone carving workshops hosted by the master carvers.
See also
- List of botanical gardens and arboretums in Missouri