Home Gardening Area

This area includes a native perennial garden, rock garden, prairie garden, water garden, woodland garden, and an Osage Indian garden.

The plants in these garden demonstrations are native to Missouri and are useful for home gardening and small outdoor school classrooms. They are available from local nurseries and mail-order catalogs.

Native plants are excellent, low-maintenance choices for home gardening because they are adapted to local conditions. They also provide habitat and food for hundreds of species of native insects, birds, and mammals.

Recommended Plant Lists for Your Garden:

Home Garden Design for Dry Shade

Home Garden Design for Dry Sun

Home Garden Design for Wet Shade

Home Garden Design for Wet Sun

Native Perennial Garden

Some of the most popular gardening perennials are native to Missouri including garden phlox Phlox paniculata, purple coneflower Echinacea purpurea, blue wild indigo Baptisia australis, and blue-flag iris Iris virginica. They have showy blooms, are disease resistant, are hardy, and are long-lived perennials in Missouiri.

Rock Garden

This small garden is essentially a pile of crushed limestone and boulders with a small amount of organic matter and clay mixed in. The plants growing here come from natural limestone glades, rocky dry areas with shallow soil and few trees. Common plants include glade coneflower Echinacea simulata, Missouri evening primrose Oenothera macrocarpa, prairie dropseed grass Sporobolus heterolepis, blazing star Liatris aspera, and golden Alexander Zizia aurea.

Plant list

Water Garden

Water gardens are excellent places to attract a wide variety of aquatic insects, dragonflies, frogs, salamanders, and birds. This small water garden is simply constructed with a rubber liner and flat rocks around the edge to hold the liner in place. A small solar-powered pump at the bottom circulates water into a “birdbath” boulder to the rear. Native water lily Nymphaea odorata, pickerelweed Pontederia cordata, and thalia Thalia dealbata grow here submerged in two feet of water.

Woodland Garden

Though many woodland wildflowers bloom in spring, there are a number that bloom in summer and fall and grow in wet or dry soils. Among them are skullcap Scutellaria incana, purple coneflower Echinacea purpurea, yellow wingstem Verbesina helianthoides, and several species of late-summer blooming asters and goldenrod.

Prairie Garden

This prairie garden has several features that make it appropriate for home landscapes. Prairie dropseed grass Sporobolus heterolopis is planted as a groundcover at the edge of a walking path with a split-rail fence between it and the prairie plants. While the fence serves to hold up the taller prairie vegetation, the dropseed creates a clean transition. Unlike typical lawns, prairie landscapes need mowing only once a year and they provide excellent habitat for wildlife.

Osage Indian Garden

Before European settlement, the Osage lived between the Osage and Missouri Rivers in western Missouri. Their seasonal hunting and trading forays brought them into eastern Missouri and northern Arkansas where they gathered plants of the prairie, glade, wetland, woodland, and savanna. Many of these plants are growing in this area.

Rain Garden

Rain gardens function like miniature natural watersheds. They slow down, capture and absorb water using elements similar to those in nature: plants, rocks, shallow swales and depressions that hold water temporarily rather than let it quickly run away. They provide beauty, natural diversity and wildlife habitat in areas that otherwise would be a monoculture of lawns, pavement, concrete culverts and storm drains. The design was created based on the original topography to collect rain water from nearby buildings and provide a beautiful setting for an outdoor patio.

Patio garden

The patio garden is located next to the Carriage house providing a beautiful outdoor classroom and meeting area. Species used around the patio are drought tolerant so as to need a minimum amount of watering. Several container gardens are also displayed on the patio showcasing a variety of beautiful arrangements. Between the patio and rain garden a variety of sedges grow on the hillside.

Areas of the Whitmire Wildflower Garden

A PDF of the Whitmire Wildflower Garden brochure is linked below:

WWFG map WWFG key