You do not need a lot of space to make a special garden that will bring the fairies into your life.

It is possible to make a truly beautiful miniature garden in a fairly small container, with just a little creativity and ingenuity. You can use plants from the garden, wildflowers and even weeds. Decorate it with pebbles and pools, let your imagination run wild!

With a little bit of know how and the right beginnings you can create a miniature fairy garden that will grow and thrive for years. You can put it in the garden or even the window. Better still, make more than one and give them as a cheering present to someone who has not got a garden themselves and introduce a bit of fairy magic into their lives. These are especially wonderful gifts for anyone who is bedridden through illness or housebound, bringing a little bit of the garden inside foe them.

Any container will do as long as it has drainage and will hold moisture. You can use old biscuit tins, trays, pots and boxes lined with plastic. For outside, the ultimate container is an old stone sink but these are getting quite difficult to find and when you do, they can be expensive. You can buy repros in garden centers, or try making your own with concrete or tufa.

You can make a simple mould from a double wall of old cardboard boxes, (a smaller one is placed upside down in the larger one and the concrete poured in the gap) or wooden boards. The sides of the finished container should be at least 2” inches thick and you can use pieces of wire fencing to reinforce the walls by putting it in the gaps before you pour.

Large earthenware trays look especially delightful when laid out with extra props, like fairy figurines as garden statues. The most creative and natural miniature fairy garden I ever saw, used a hollowed out log as a container! Remember though to consider the weight of your container, if you are going to place it on a balcony or use it as a window box.

Whatever container you decide to use must be waterproof to hold moisture and have adequate drainage, and somewhere for that to go. If you are going to place your fairy garden container in a drip tray to catch the water that escapes, try to raise it slightly above the tray, by putting some stones or gravel beneath it. This will allow the container to drain more freely and stop the water stagnating in the bottom of the container.

To help with this drainage you should first fill the bottom of your container with broken crockery, pots or stones. Next fill up the container to about 2” inches from the top with suitable soil or compost depending on the needs of what flowers you intend to grow. A handy tip is to place a tube vertically in one corner of the container as you are filling it. Make sure you do not get any soil in it! The top should just be proud of the surface and you can hide it with a stone. Shallow containers can dry out to quickly and this is a great way of making sure, that when you water the container it gets straight to the roots where it is needed.

 

Next, you must work out the design of your garden. The aim is to reproduce a natural garden in a small scale that the fairies will appreciate. Therefore care should be given to how the pieces you use relate to one another. A miniature fairy cottage garden can contain sundials, dovecotes, little covered seats or arbors. Paths can be made of small gravel or marble chips. I have found lots of suitable materials in “aquarium” specialist shops, that sell pretty coloured stones for decorating the bottom of fish tanks.

If you want to have a little rockery you can use limestone for Alpine plants but make sure you use sandstone for other plants that do not like lime. If you want to make a little brick wall you can make your own small bricks from clay dug up in the garden and dry them in your kitchen oven. You can make small pools with bridges, or even fountain and cascades. The simplest way to make a pool is to sink a stone, earthenware or plastic dish into soil. You can use grit to to disguise the bottom if you want, or paint it some dark neutral colour. To make it look more natural you can then surround the edge with small pebbles and plants.

Cascades and fountains will require a pump of some sort to keep the water circulating. The water will flow down through different pools and levels to where it drains into a hidden container, where the water is collected and sent back to the top again, by the pump. You will have to make sure that the hidden container or “sump” as it is known, is regularly topped up. This is because you will lose water because of evaporation and you must not let the pump run dry. There are some quite useful small water pumps on the market, that run on the power of “solar cells”. These will be cheap to run but your waterfall will only work when the sun is shining!

Where you place your finished miniature fairy garden is also very important. You must not place it where it will be subjected to extremes of temperature like wind. frost and rain. So try and find a sunny but sheltered spot facing south. How sunny will depend a lot on the sorts of plants you decide to use. Like people, some plants thrive in strong sunlight while others prefer to sit in the shade. Other plants will prefer to keep their feet wet. All this will have to be taken into consideration when you decide on what plants to use.

 

 

 

For your convenience I have bundled up this information with a BIG list of small plants that you might find useful and put it into PDF Format.

 

I have tried to pick out those that will fit in with a small landscape and help the magical effect of a miniature fairy garden.

You can download "The Fairy Garden " here & now.

 

best wishes

 

Greenjackdavey