Powell Gardens Conservatory (Visitor Education Center)

The Powell Gardens estate was bought in 1948 by George E. Powell Sr., a Kansas City businessman, and first run as a dairy farm. In 1969 he gave 640 acres to the Kansas City Area Council of the Boy Scouts, which used the land as a regional camp until 1984. That year the Powell Family Foundation joined the University of Missouri's School of Agriculture to develop an agricultural centre, the Powell Center; when that partnership ended in 1988 the site became an independent botanical garden, Powell Gardens Inc.

The garden then turned for its main buildings to the architect E. Fay Jones, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, and to Maurice Jennings, who had joined his practice in 1972. After the Meadow Pavilion, a multi-tiered redwood trellis completed in 1995, and the Marjorie Powell Allen Chapel in 1996, the Visitor Education Center opened in February 1997, with the glass-domed conservatory at its heart.

The conservatory now formally bears the name Martha Jane Phillips Starr Butterfly Conservatory. Each summer it hosts the Festival of Butterflies, which reached its 24th edition in 2021. The estate has gone on adding event buildings: the Missouri Barn in 2009, the Miller Hammond Chapel Study in 2018 and a new entrance in 2020. The successor to the Jones and Jennings practice, Jennings + Santa-Rita Architects, is led by Maurice's son Walter Jennings.

The Visitor Education Center is an 18,000-square-foot building, about 1,670 m², built of redwood, limestone and glass. Jones and Jennings designed not only the architecture but all of its furnishings, in the manner that marks their work: natural materials, wide expanses of glass that bring the outside in, and lines that let the building settle into its surroundings.

The conservatory is its centrepiece. Thirty feet, or about nine metres, high, it is crowned by a glass dome visible from several points across the grounds. It provides a climate-controlled setting, and when it becomes a butterfly house a fine mist recreates the steamy air of the equatorial regions. A hatching chamber then lets the insects, delivered as chrysalides, emerge safely in full view of visitors.

The building works in concert with the other Jones and Jennings structures on the estate, above all the Marjorie Powell Allen Chapel of 1996, 47 feet high and 102 feet long, with 2,550 square feet of glass.

Rather than a permanent collection, the conservatory shows rotating installations, changed through the year to match the garden's seasonal festivals, with tropical foliage and colourful blooms in turn.

In spring and summer it is transformed into a tropical forest for hundreds of tropical butterflies and moths, among nectar plants and flowering trees. Wikipedia mentions blue morphos and paper kite butterflies. The 2021 festival put the spotlight on Peru and introduced 22 new varieties; the public radio station KCUR named among them the great eggfly, atlas moth, brown clipper, great yellow mormon, blue morpho and magnificent owl. Visitors can watch a butterfly leave its chrysalis and pump out its wings. The garden as a whole holds some 6,000 plant varieties, with 225,000 plants in its seasonal displays.

Powell Gardens lies at Kingsville, about 30 miles east of Kansas City on US Highway 50. The Visitor Education Center, gateway to the 970-acre garden, opens directly onto the Terrace Gardens, replanted three times a year: by mid-April, in mid- to late May, and in September and October. The liveliest time is the Festival of Butterflies in July and early August, when the conservatory is joined by pollinator displays elsewhere in the garden. A visit extends easily to the Marjorie Powell Allen Chapel, the Meadow Pavilion and the Heartland Harvest Garden.