Miniature Gardening

I’m sure you have seen them popping up in gardening stores, all over Pinterest or Facebook, often called fairy gardens: garden worlds created in miniature scale. I feel this remake has officially broken into that territory. 

To clear things up a little, this actually started when I remodeled the garden area at the back, eastern corner of our house. I had a spot that I thought a miniature patio set would look great in, so I got one. My suppositions were correct and it looked great. The mini patio located up near the walkway and fence. Fast forward to this year, we have so many bulbs in nearly every garden bed that almost nothing else can grow. Helpful for keeping the weeds/grass out. It’s great as it provides a sea of flowers in March and April. As they die off however, it starts to look bad. Instead of letting that happen I decided to jump start the cleaning process. I pulled or cut the bulb leaves after the flowers had expired. My little patio area looked ok while I was thinking of ways to tidy it up a new idea sparked.

This coincided with Richard cleaning up the garage a little. I had noticed a larger saucer when he  did that. I knew I could use that to spruce up my fairy garden. Being about 16 to 18 inches, it made a great size for all the items I had collected last summer. One sunny afternoon, I pulled the items from the corner garden, got out the other supplies I needed and went to town. The result is a great remake! 

I designed it to have the feel as if you were alongside a stream. Rocks of various sizes take up about two-thirds of the saucer while soil and moss are on the other.  You may notice that some of my rocks aren’t typical, a number of years ago a friend who collects geodes and other rocks let me pick through their stuff. I left with about 6 buckets worth of quartz, obsidian, lava rock and the like in a wide range of sizes. 

I added some broken glass pieces to be a sort of walkway for the bench and wee pots. The terra cotta pot was left behind the previous owner of the house. At some point they had painted blue hearts on it. That didn’t go with my theme, so I glued moss to the exposed areas of the pot.  I’m pleased with how it turned out. Really, the only thing this is missing is a tiny waterfall coming from the back of the pot and flowing into the stream rocks.

Now, since these are addicting to create of course I had to do a second one! This is made about a week later.  While searching for a container I ran across an soap dish I made many years ago at a paint your own pottery shop. Yes, I did buy the little chair, lantern, bee hive and bucket. The plant, former soap dish and fence gate were from around my house. My neighbor has a whole potting area filled with pots, sauces and other random containers so this one came from her stash. For her garden she used a half wine barrel that has been empty in their front yard for a bit. Her’s turned out awesome! Completely with little red mushrooms with white spots, a sort of hobbit style house and a tiny tree.

Until next time! Keep up the yard work!