Guest Post: Kauffman Memorial Gardens - Kansas City, MO

Today I have a guest post by the illustrious blogger May Evans of May's Machete! On her blog, the beautiful and brilliant geeky goddess May shares her thoughts on the world and her personal life. (Fair warning: May's blog is for adult audiences. You have been warned.) A special thanks to May for her amazing work! And I encourage everyone to check out her wonderful blog!

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One of the places tourists often go in Kansas City (MO) is the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. A slightly-less well, known, but beautiful jewel located just across the street from the museum is the Kauffman Memorial Gardens. Gifted to Kansas City by Ewing and Muriel Kauffman, this two-acre garden now has has 65,000 visitors annually, and it's no wonder why! The place is positively bursting with plant life and busy insects taking advantage of the feast!

One of the things my boyfriend and I were most impressed with was the massive array of bugs you could see, busily pollinating all the different types of flowers. If you're scared of insects, this is the perfect place to go because they're so distracted with the flowers that you can eyeball them up close without them ever evening noticing. I was amazed at the number of bees present, but we also saw crickets, grasshoppers, several types of moths, two types of butterflies (including a lovely Monarch), and even one bug that looked like a hybrid dragonfly-shrimp-hummingbird... We're still not convinced that bug isn't wasn't an alien because it looked too otherworldly to even be real!

The garden features 7,000 plants, with more than 300 varieties that include vintage and modern perennials, annuals, shrubs, bulbs and trees. The flowers ranged from wildflower varieties to more formal flowers like roses. The colors and types were mixed and matched in an innumerable amount of beds that wandered around pathways so that at any point in the garden, you could only see about one-fourth of it.

Another delightful feature of the garden were several fountains. The largest seemed to be popular for wedding photos, because we saw four different wedding parties lined up there for snapshots.

My favorite fountain was the one with three dancing girl statues.

Each turn of the path brought something new and surprising into view, but I have to say I was the most surprised by finding the graves of Ewing and Murial Kauffman within the garden walls! The area was flanked by benches, so I guess if you wanted to you could sit and meditate on how quickly life passes and all that... I personally chose to move on and spend my attention on the amazing life all around us.

The Kauffman Memorial Garden is located at 4800 Rockhill Road and is free to the public. It's open from 8 AM to dusk. I suggest you go there now while all the flowers are in bloom, before autumn and winter start to take a bite out of the amazing color.

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A special thanks again to the lovely May! Now go check out her blog May's Machete!