A slight shower Sunday morning cleared just in time for hundreds to visit local home gardens and find inspiration.
For the past 22 years, Jefferson City's Bittersweet Garden Club has offered tours of stunning local gardens as a fundraiser to support scholarships for area students. Tours this year included an extra garden for a total of six.
Marcia Willing, 70, owns "My Perfect Garden," the first stop of the garden tour at 1109 Moreau Drive.
Willing and her partner built their house in 2019, and Willing decided to utilize the front lawn to showcase colorful annuals and the backyard to relax.
"I wanted to have a lot of perennials because I don't want to spend all my time gardening," she said. "I like it, but, you know, you could be out here all day if you wanted to."
Willing chose her favorite plants to fill her garden and fenced it off to avoid intrusions from deer that also like her plants. The color and low-maintenance backyard are what make it the perfect garden, she said.
Each garden along Bittersweet's tour was noticeably different and heavily influenced by the personalities of their creators.
Willing said that's what attracts visitors.
While some include elaborate landscaping ideas, others might expose gardeners to plants and pairings they have never seen before.
"I think it's just instructive to see what other people do and get some ideas," she said. "Going around and looking at other people's yards, you get some ideas of what works and what doesn't."
Time considerations are another factor Willing said she thinks about when viewing other gardens. She knows she's not looking for anything too high maintenance.
"There are several types of flowers that I've actually never seen before at (another garden on the tour)," Willing said. "She had some really unusual flowers I'd never seen, so maybe next year I'll put them in."
Marcia Reed, Bittersweet's former president, said the annual tours are strikingly popular and usually attract well more than 500 visitors.
"It's a little rough on the grass, but it perks back up after a couple of days," she said.
Reed said the brief rain Sunday morning freshened the gardens ahead of showtime. With more than 80 members, the garden club divides into teams to prepare the gardens, make final touches and guide visitors
Sue Kauffman, 79, owns and meticulously maintains "Gardener's Delight" at 1427 Edgevale Rd.
Kauffman, who built her garden from scratch, has lived at her home for four years, but has been winning neighborhood best garden awards for as long as she can remember.
"This is my life," she said, noting gardening is up there with pickleball and her grandchildren on her list of favorite things.
Kauffman keeps several plants she found growing in her yard confined to a section she covered in gravel. She uses it as a kind of bank to store and move plants as she needs.
She said she doesn't have a vision she tries to stick to, but rather develops her garden as new needs and plants arise.
"Anybody can grow it, they have to put the effort there," Kauffman said. "It's an effort thing because it takes a lot of time and you've got to stay with it; you can't just plant it. It's like a job."
The garden occupies her time and headspace, Kauffman said. Even after spending time working on her garden every day for the past four years, Kauffman said she found herself waking up in the middle of the night wondering what to do with the large retaining wall running along the back of the garden.
Kauffman said she didn't select a lot of the plants that grow in her garden, they cropped up voluntarily. And what she has an excess of, she gives away.
"I have blackberries and I took my little neighbor lady -- she's pretty elderly -- up a big thing yesterday," she said, later adding that her pickleball friends also all own plants from her garden.
When Kauffman finds a wilting or dying plant at a garden center, she said that's the one she takes home.
"I bring them home and they're my baby," she said.
To prevent deer, Kauffman fenced in her back garden herself. She also hauled rock, installed pavers and maintains the plants herself.
She also monitors news and updates related to gardening, noting that the Japanese beetle was back in the U.S. and affecting the bloom of some plants in her garden.
"90 percent of my time is out here in the garden," she said before squashing a beetle off a plant. "I just love it."
Gardening is a family trait. Kauffman's mother was a gardener and she said her granddaughter Lucy's gardening skills put her to shame.
With a bigger, better garden in Nashville, Tennessee, Kauffman said Lucy is her inspiration.
"I had given her a lot of my blackberries and they're doing really well down there," she said.
Gardening has to be a consistent passion to be successful, Kauffman said.
"You plant it, you take care of it, you feed it like the kids," she said. "You take care of it like they're babies. These are my babies."
Chuck Carl and Vicki McDonald, of Columbia, toured Sue Kauffman's garden, called "Gardener's Delight," on Sunday. Kauffman's garden was one of six on display for the Bittersweet Garden Club's 22nd annual garden tour. (Photo by Ryan Pivoney/News Tribune)