Mini Gardening – Fun is NOT Optional

 

If you have a passion about plants, as many of us do, making a garden with miniature plants is different and challenging.  Call it a ‘fairy garden’ or ‘miniature gardening,’ regardless of the name its

FUN!

Real life gardens have a set shape and pattern – sidewalks, paths, walls, houses, etc. are what we fashion our gardens around.  Mini-gardens are great because the plants are the set pieces in this world.  Patio furniture, walls, mini-people, and houses are moved around the plants.

Plants first – as it should be!!

We decided to spruce up the mini-garden at one customers’ home, and ended up deciding to change it every week.  In case the challenge of routine garden maintenance was not enough…

The plants are the only set pieces:

• A ‘tall’ shade tree (15 inches),
• Two ‘understory’ trees (up to 10 inches tall),
• Two evergreen ‘trees (up to 10 inches tall), and
• Two distinct groundcovers (1 inch tall).

The boss liked where the project was heading, so we got to go shopping (and subsequently write a blog post)!!

Now we have a plethora of tiny furniture, fences, fairy kids, birdhouses, cats, mushrooms, and seasonal items like flags, pumpkins, and christmas lights to re-create the mini-garden each week.

The prop inventory grows weekly as we started using natural props:

• Willow oak acorns and Holly berries look like harvested crops,
• Flower pot drain trays make a nice pond basin, and
• Small twigs can be stacked logs by a house.

Of course our prop inventory includes good tools of the gardening trade like shovels, rakes, wheelbarrows, wagons, and flower pots.

We fill the three, one inch flower pots each week with fresh flowers from the customers’ cut-flower garden. Sort of a mini-garden within a mini-garden…

Doesn’t that make you want to go and make a mini-garden right now!

The mini-gardens we work on are outside, but there are numerous plants grown for full shade. This would be great for someone in an urban setting without full size gardening access (nightmarish to think of), or help you make it through a long winter when you have gardening withdraws.

If you need professional advice or plant sources, try these two books from the Northside Library:

• Fairy Gardening: Creating Your Own Magical Miniature Garden by Julie Bawden-Davis & Beverly Turner,
• Gardening in Miniature: Create Your Own Tiny Living World by Janit Calvo, and
• the internet is loaded with pictures, resources, and information too.

All the times we played with our toys as kids and made pretend worlds out of all the ‘stuff’ lying around – well this is the grown up version, plants included.