Accessories turn a collection of plants into a tiny universe.
Teeny tiny accessories are what make mini-gardens mini-gardens. Selecting accessories is one of the most fun parts of creating a miniature garden. There are so many cute, interesting, and tempting little patio sets, pots, birdbaths, animals, and more that it’s hard to stop with just a few. (I speak from experience.) Accessories are what make a potful of plants into a tiny garden that you feel you could walk into and sit down in. Accessories establish a theme and tell a story.
Whether you buy accessories or make your own, you’re certain to have fun with this part of miniature gardening.
Miniature gardening (and fairy gardening) is so popular that it’s becoming increasingly easier to find furniture, paving materials, and other accessories. When choosing accessories, ask these questions:
• Where will the garden live, indoors or out?
• What is the scale of the accessories in relation to each other and to the plants?
• What is the style or theme of the garden, rustic or formal? Woods or desert? Historic or modern?
You can find miniature garden accessories everywhere. Flea markets are an excellent place to find small figurines or discarded dollhouse furniture. The Etsy website and other handmade marketplaces are filled with artists and crafters selling accessories specifically made for fairy gardens and miniature gardens. You can also find a lot of animals by looking through ceramic offerings on these sites.
Craft stores stock fewer miniatures than they used to, but it’s worth a peek in the dollhouse section. You can find materials for making your own accessories throughout the entire craft store—from the cake decorating aisle to the woodworking section, and even the jewelry and bead area.
Model train stores—online and brick-and-mortar—are also good places to shop for accessories.
The Wild Wild West Garden includes handmade accessories purchased from Etsy (the ceramic chameleon and the small cacti) and mass-manufactured accessories from a garden center (skeleton and steer head).
This red bicycle is a popular fairy garden accessory. You’ll find it at almost every store that sells miniature garden furniture. Why is it so popular? Probably because it easily helps the viewer connect to the garden. Everyone knows what size a bicycle is in real life. Adding one to the garden creates an instant sense of scale.
As discussed in the design chapter, it’s important to consider scale when selecting miniature garden accessories. If the lounging cat you place on a patio is bigger than the bench it’s sitting next to, the mini-garden goes from a little scene to a big mess. Rain boots should be about the same size as chair legs. Miniature food shouldn’t be bigger than the plate it’s sitting on.
Anyone can picture himself or herself in this scene, sitting at a bistro table, sipping coffee and reading the paper in the morning.
The story could also be called the theme of the miniature garden. With so many adorable accessories available, it’s hard to choose and stick to a theme. That’s why you’ll end up with so many mini-gardens eventually—or why you’ll end up changing your accessories from time to time. You’ll find two patio sets at the garden center (like I did) and require two totally different gardens to put them in.
Can you see yourself sitting in your miniature garden? Do you chuckle when you look at the tableau you’ve created? Would you like to take a stroll through the botanical garden you planted? If your imagination takes off where the garden ends, you’ve succeeded in telling a story with your miniature garden.
Some dried bits of ornamental grass serve as “straw” in the chicken run, completing the look and finishing the story.
A chicken coop and rustic garden accessories are right for this mini-garden effect. Wrought iron would look out of place in this garden.
A woodland garden needs a campfire. This tiny fire circle, woodpile, and marshmallow sticks were handmade by an artist on Etsy.
Have fun with miniature gardening. Not everything has to be serious.
Style goes hand in hand with the story or theme. To create a realistic effect, the components of the scene must look like they belong together. Decorating a miniature garden is not unlike decorating a room of your house. Victorian gardens are created with wrought-iron furniture and intricate arbors. A rustic hideaway requires wooden benches and Adirondack chairs and a rough-stone patio. Mushrooms don’t really grow in the desert, so they don’t belong in a desert garden, but they’d look right at home in a hobbit garden in the woods.
Where will the garden live after it’s planted? Plastic accessories hold up the best in outdoor gardens, with metal coming in a close second. Wooden accessories will last for a few seasons. Paper accessories should only be used in indoor gardens or for special-occasion decorating.
The humid environment of an enclosed terrarium is best suited for ceramic, resin, or plastic accessories.
Furniture is just part of the picture in the mini-garden. Mulch adds a finishing touch to the mini-garden just as it does to a regular-sized garden. The mulch layer you use depends on what’s in your garden.
Tumbled glass and pottery shards are available for bulk purchase.
Moss is a good mulch for terrariums and woodland gardens. You can purchase sheet moss (left) and preserved reindeer moss (right) or harvest moss from your own garden (top).
Use seashells as mulch in an underwater garden or around succulents.
Three types of mulch: tumbled glass, smooth polished stones, and pea gravel.
Stuff on a Stick
Shop for mini-garden accessories and you’ll find lots of things on sticks. (These are called “picks.”) That’s to make the items easier to place into the garden. Dollhouses have flat surfaces, so their accessories are less likely to roll around. If you grab a dollhouse miniature for your mini-garden and find that it won’t stay in place, use some hot glue to attach a skinny dowel, bamboo skewer, or piece of floral wire to the back or bottom so that you can stick the accessory into the soil where it will stay put.
Miniature garden accessory picks come in all styles, sizes, and colors.
Put your miniature garden furniture on a patio to make it stand out. Build a garden path to create a sense of movement within the garden. There are many options for miniature garden pathways and patios.
You can find tiny bricks, little flagstones, and molded mosaic steppingstones to create garden pathways.
This pathway is made from tiles on a mat. All you have to do is cut to size and place in the garden.
One option for a patio is to purchase a resin, wood, or stone patio that’s preformed for the purpose of showcasing patio furniture.
You don’t have to buy an already-formed patio for your mini-garden. You can make your own.
Purchase a piece of tile mat at the hardware store and cut a piece that’s large enough to fit whatever you want to sit on it (a fountain, patio set, and so forth). Lay it on the soil and sprinkle sand over it. (You can use patio-setting sand for this.)
Use a foam brush to brush the sand into the cracks between the tiles and to clean off the patio.
You can use regular pea gravel or fairy-sized gravel to make a patio or pathway. If you can find fairy gravel or very fine gravel, use it, as it will look more realistic as a garden path. If you have two sizes or colors of gravel you can use one to make a path (use the smaller-sized gravel for this) and use one as mulch.
You may want to use a thin metal edge or a wooden edge to contain the gravel from your patio, but you don’t have to.
You may also just pour the gravel in the general shape you want for a less formal feel.
Popsicle sticks form an edge for this fairy garden path.
Two sizes of gravel. Above is “fairy garden gravel,” which is very fine. Below is regular pea gravel, which is the size of, well, a pea.
You can customize mini-garden accessories to make them stand out from the background and add color.
Dollhouse accessories usually require a bit of work before they’re fit for the mini-garden. I wanted a “door” for my Backyard Pool garden, so I found one in the dollhouse construction materials. It had a glass window and a hinge, but it needed to be painted. It also had no way to stand up without being affixed to a dollhouse. A few dowels glued to either side of the back of the door and we were in business (see the facing page). (You have to imagine the rest of the house.)
Useful tools for making and customizing accessories include paint, paint brushes, floral picks, corsage pins, floral wire, and pliers. Not pictured: a glue gun and glue sticks—a must.
Painting wrought-iron accessories adds color to the garden. A foam brush makes easy work of this type of project.
This was a vanity table for a dollhouse. I made two small shelves from popsicle sticks, took the drawer out, and painted the whole shelf to create a potting bench.
Why get stuck with a specific style of fairy house or potting shed? You can grab an unfinished house or birdhouse and customize it to match your look. Francine, a miniature gardener in my town, took a plain cottage and embellished it with shingles made from pinecones, “siding” made from birch bark, and lichens for detailing.
The blue door for the mini-garden was inspired by an antique blue farmhouse door I’ve had in my apartments and houses ever since I’ve lived on my own.
You can make your own fairy house by starting with a plastic cup.
1. Cut a “door” in one side of the top of the cup.
2. Soften the plastic glare by painting the cup with a contrasting color.
3. Glue the twigs around the fairy house. Vary the length of the twigs for a more rustic effect.
4. Fill in the gaps between sticks by gluing moss to the house.
5. Use moss around the top and bottom of the fairy house to fill in the “chinks” between the twigs.
Sticks and twigs are free. You can build almost anything out of them, including fences, pergolas, trellises, and tiny tomato cages. This twig pergola was put to good use in the garden.
A simple woven twig fence in one of the children’s miniature gardens displayed at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show.
1. Cut the four corner post twigs so that they are about the same length.
2. Cut 8 inches of wire to wire each twig joint together.
3. Place the wire under the first two twigs, crossed.
4. Wrap the wire around one set of opposing crosses and then around the opposite set to stabilize the twigs. Repeat with each joint.
5. Some beaded wire wrapped loosely around the top of the pergola completes the look and adds some “hippie chic.” You can also use miniature fairy garden lights for this.
Want to have even more fun with your mini-garden? Decorate for the holidays.
This is probably the easiest holiday for mini-decorating because there are tons of Christmas miniatures available, including tiny lights.
Snowmen ornaments with their hooks removed serve as table decorations.
This tiny Christmas tree was part of a Christmas ornament. I just used wire clippers to “liberate” it so that it could decorate the bistro table.
You could make a little chain out of paper, but any stray water would make a mess of it in short order. Instead, I used multi-colored twist ties from the cake-decorating area of the craft store.
Little metal snowflakes from the Christmas wrapping aisle and a chain made from twist ties decorate this mini-garden.
1. Thread a twist tie through the link below it (or make the first link if you’re starting the chain). Form a circle with a twist tie (you can wrap it around your index finger to gauge the size). Leave a short end out to twist.
2. Twist the short end around the link. You can wrap the longer end around the loop once before cutting it, as well.
3. Cut off the long end of the tie and wrap the newly cut end around the link so that it lies flat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Periodically test the chain length on the tree, fence, or area where you want to use it. You can use the small-gauge wire on either end of the chain to secure it to the tree.
A ghost roasts marshmallows. The marshmallow stick is hot-glued into the folds of the ghost “sheet.”
My husband, Joe, apparently met an untimely end in the Wild Wild West. (I customized the headstone with a black permanent marker.) The grave mounds are made from potting soil. If you want, you can mold little soil mounds by mixing some soil and glue together, forming the mounds, and letting them dry.
The pumpkins on the table are made from marbles. I put a dab of hot glue on the bottom to make a flat surface for them to stand up. Several coats of orange paint, and some floral wire twisted and glued to the tops and the pumpkins were ready for prime time.
A hand reaches out from the grave. Is it for you?
The same garden decorated for Christmas looks equally festive for the Fourth of July. Some stickers from the scrapbooking section of a craft store, a miniature American flag on a realistic-looking flagpole, and some confetti do the trick.
You can use twist ties and hot glue to make fireworks. Green floral wire lets the fireworks float in the “sky” above the garden.
