Apartment Garden Blues (Blog): Fairy Gardens

Details: Published on Friday, March 29 2013 20:31; Written by Alexandra Martin

Fairy gardens are a big fad today, where people create small container gardens filled with miniature furniture and plants. I see these gardens at pretty much every garden store or event that I go to, and there are even workshops dedicated to creating fairy gardens.

Some people put little fairy statues in the garden, but others leave them empty in an attempt to attract real fairies to their garden! (Of course, I don’t think anyone really believes that – it’s just for fun.) Many cultures believed in fairies (or still believe in them), and all believed something a little bit different. In Celtic folklore, fairies were tiny people driven out of this world by invading humans (we tend to do that, don’t we?). Some fairies stayed in our world, but they hide and are hard to see because they wear flowers for clothes. These mischievous creatures play tricks on us in our gardens, like moving things around. To make up for invading their home for many hundreds of years, people today welcome fairies to their gardens by making a comfortable place for them. Making a home and garden area for tiny fairies can be a fun project, especially for small-space balcony gardeners who don’t have a ton of space.

Planting a fairy garden is similar to creating a terrarium. Choose a container (shallow but wide containers work best for this type of mini garden). Then fill the container with a layer of small pebbles or marbles, charcoal and then potting soil. Then you can fill in your fairy garden with plants (of course, add small plants or those you can prune easily, and some groundcover for the fairy grass) and accessories. There are so many accessories for fairy gardens that you can do pretty much anything you want! I’ve seen tiny homes, furniture, birdbaths, ponds, arbors and trellises, plant pots, gardening equipment, mailboxes, Jack-O-Lanterns, stone walkways and tire swings.

For your first fairy garden, you can make it easy on yourself and either get a fairy garden kit or attend a workshop.

Say hi to your fairies for me!

_______________________________________

Alexandra Martin is a professional writer from Southern California who grows vegetables, herbs, lots of aloe vera and one giant Boston fern in her balcony garden. She also grows dracaena, pothos and English ivy indoors. She loves traveling and birdwatching in addition to gardening.