Gardens
No Ordinary Landscape
A Kansas City horticulturist shares her home and garden with many feathered friends.

In a letter to a new friend, the poet Emily Dickinson wrote, “I hope you love birds, too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.” A little bit of heaven has been created by Yvonne Patterson expressly for her birds. Tucked away in the ample backyard of her Kansas City home, the “bird garden” has been created for Yvonne’s flock of exotic birds.

A horticulturist, Yvonne discovered her current calling when she took three exotic birds to work and hung their cages in the trees of a local attraction. Discovering that the public wanted to know more about the birds and the tropical places of which they are native, she designed a rain forest environment for them to enjoy. From there, a new career was born. She formed Wings of Love to enable the birds to show off their talents as well as educate nonfeathered bipeds. Yvonne has since added to her flock — there are now 17 colorful ambassadors with lessons to teach about geography, rain forests, environmental protection and how to have a great time at a party.

To make the birds feel at home, Yvonne nestles pots filled with green and growing wonders from around the world amid her daylilies, coleus and begonias. Orchids mingle with Australian tree ferns, a cycad palm is flanked by hostas, and a tall pink-bloomed Plumeria grows beneath the 15-year-old bald cypress with a shrimp plant and maidenhair ferns to keep it company. She has one fan palm that is more than 25 years old and going strong. The birds, rooming together in an expansive solarium, enjoy watching native birds splashing in the bird bath among the exotics outside their windows.

A cluster of cages form an aviary just steps from the sunroom, allowing the flock to spend lots of time outdoors when they aren’t working. The old shade tree that used to stand in the middle of the cages suffered a direct hit from lightning recently and exploded with such force that it damaged the fence several feet away. Yvonne has since filled that void with a beautiful array of plumeria, ferns, orchids, hostas, impatiens, bromeliads, a 30-year-old bird of paradise, variegated hibiscus and a sweetly blooming jasmine.

In the center of Yvonne’s back lawn, adjacent to a seating area, another bed hosts a collection of coleus, bromeliads, petunias and geraniums, along with two or three pots of cherry tomatoes. “I’m raising tomatoes, sunflowers and grapes for the birds,” Yvonne explains. “My neighbor contributes blackberries from her vines across the fence.”

Twice a year, the entire collection of exotic plants requires transport into or out of Yvonne’s greenhouse attached to the sunroom. Supervised by feathered onlookers, Aaron Mitchell comes over from Kansas State University, where he is a graduate student in the landscape architecture program, to trolley the pots from garden to greenhouse or vice versa. “Yvonne’s landscape is no ordinary landscape,” he notes. “In fact, she has several species of plants that I have never seen in another Midwestern landscape.” He enjoys the fact that his education has been broadened because of his association with Yvonne. “I remember when she told me about the bromeliads and how poison dart frogs carry their tadpoles piggyback-style up the trees and deposit them in the cups of the bromeliad leaves,” he says. “Then, the tadpoles feed on insects that get trapped in the cups. Toucans also drink from the cups instead of going to the ground.”

How does Yvonne keep her potted plants growing so lushly in a foreign environment? “A lot of it has to do with meeting their shade requirements,” she explains. In the wild, most of them are understory plants, growing under the canopy of the tallest trees and require little or no direct sunlight. Being rainforest plants, Yvonne must tend to their moisture requirements as well. When the birds bask in the summer breezes, they enjoy a brisk shower from the hose, as do the exotic plants.

Yvonne’s original inspiration to become a horticulturist came out of her curiosity “to learn what goes on inside a leaf and comprehend the colors of leaves changing in the fall,” she says. Now the colors around her include those of brilliant feathers. She considers it an honor to work with the exotic birds for educational purposes. “Aside from all the laughter they’ve provided through the years, they have demonstrated what love truly is,” she says. The exotic garden Yvonne has created to make them feel at home brings that love full circle.