An indoor garden serves as a centerpiece and conversation starter.
What makes an indoor garden different from an outdoor miniature garden? The plant selection. Houseplants, air plants, and some succulents grow well indoors. Most perennials and annual flowers just don’t do as well inside.
Advantages of indoor miniature gardens:
• You have greater flexibility with accessories (you don’t have to worry about weather).
• You aren’t constrained by hardiness zones in plant selection.
Challenges of indoor miniature gardens:
• You have to use plants that need lower amounts of light.
• You must be careful not to overwater.
All indoor miniature gardens will benefit from getting the chance to grow outside during the summer. Set the garden under a tree or on a screened porch where it will get bright, indirect light. Natural predators will attack any pests that might be on the plants. More humid air and brighter sunlight will cause the plants to perk up. Just make sure to remove any paper, cardboard, or wooden accessories (that you don’t want to weather) until you move them back inside.
I’ve always loved visiting the desert, but the idea of moving so far away from the ocean isn’t for me. To give myself a bit of the West on the East Coast, I planted a Wild Wild West Garden. If you live somewhere with slow-draining soil that’s inhospitable to succulents or want to grow some “sunshine” to get you through a long winter, plant a western-themed indoor garden. This garden was inspired by the turquoise blue patio furniture, which reminded me of the painted metal chairs my grandparents had on their farm when I was little. If only we’d kept those!
The blue in the chameleon repeats the blue of the patio furniture and ties the design together.
Turquoise patio set
Twig pergola (See instructions for making this in Chapter 4)
Ceramic chameleon
Ceramic horned toad
Skeleton
Ceramic cacti
Rusty metal fence
Steer head skeleton
Plants in the Wild Wild West Garden don’t fit neatly into categories of “trees,” “shrubs,” and groundcovers. There are taller plants and shorter plants to create layers of interest. All of the plants in this garden are succulents or cacti. There are a few air plants artfully placed to look like tumbling tumbleweeds.
Tall Plants
Aloe spp., aloe
Crassula spp., jade plant
Short Plants
Sempervivum spp., hens and chickens (or hens and chicks)
Sedum spp.
Cacti (there are many genera and types of cacti)
Succulents are a must for a western-themed garden.
Because this is an indoor garden, the specific genus of the succulents doesn’t really matter. You don’t have to check for cold-hardiness. As long as all of the plants will thrive with the same general light requirement, you’ll be OK with whatever you choose.
This garden is planted in a rectangular, plastic self-watering container. It is 22 inches by 18 inches by 6 inches deep. The self-watering part isn’t important for this garden, but it’s fairly easy to find large, square shallow containers when you look at the self-watering section. People use them to grow patio vegetables.
I kept the drain holes plugged in this container, so I’ll have to avoid overwatering.
Mix perlite with potting soil to create a lightweight cacti and succulent mix.
1. Fill the container with the amended potting soil mixture. Place the largest accessory—in this case, the pergola—first. It will provide a framework for the other elements and plants.
2. Position the plants in the garden to check spacing before planting. That way, if you have extra plants, you won’t have disturbed their roots by taking them out of their pots. (You can plant a different garden with any extras.)
3. Plant the plants. You can take the pergola out if you leave the plants in their pots in place. I used the sedum as “shrubs” behind and around the pergola.
4. Add the mulch. Light-colored pea gravel keeps with the western color palette without being as messy as sand.
Tip: I used some broken tumbled pottery and glass in a different color in order to create a kind of “dry river” through the garden. You can see that in front of the patio set.
5. Place the accessories. The cacti are specimen plants in this garden and are planted around the front right corner of the pergola. A horned toad keeps watch next to them. Water the garden to settle the plants. You want the soil to be damp but not soaking wet.
A hand-painted chameleon enjoys “shade” from the aloe plant.
Care and Maintenance
The biggest challenge with this garden is watering correctly. If in doubt, let the plants and soil dry out a bit between watering. You shouldn’t have to water these plants more than once a week if the garden is outside and every two weeks if it’s inside. Keep an eye on the plants; if they look gray or shriveled, they need water.
To water the air plants (one is along the edge of the front of the garden and two are along the right side of the garden) just pick them up and soak them in a bowl of water for an hour once a week.
This garden looks great when decorated for Halloween. It turns into a combination of an abandoned gold-mining ghost town and a haunted house.
It’s fun to make a miniature garden that looks like a backyard so that you can decorate it for holidays. You might recognize this indoor miniature garden from the Christmas and Fourth of July photos in Chapter 4. This is a large garden, and therefore can hold more accessories, offering plenty of space to personalize it. One finishing touch that doesn’t necessarily photograph well, but that is fun when you see the garden in person, is the addition of little resin songbirds perching in the trees and on furniture. My friend whose hands are featured in many of these photographs is an environmental scientist who works with birds. When I see the birds in this garden, I think of her.
The picnic table and bistro set were painted to customize them and add color to the garden.
Dollhouse door, painted
Bistro table and chairs, painted
Picnic table, painted
Preformed miniature garden pool
Square of bathroom tile mat
Resin garden gnome
Ceramic birdbath
Ceramic dogs
Resin songbirds
Metal lantern and shepherd’s hook
Resin turtle
Folded newspaper
Coffee cup and saucer
Terra cotta pots
Metal trellis
Sun hat
Soda bottles in caddy
“Trees”
Ficus benjamina, ficus tree
Cupressus macrocarpa ‘Wilma Goldcrest’, Wilma
Goldcrest (Monterey) cypress
“Shrubs”
Table ferns
Ophiopogon japonicus ‘Nanus’, dwarf mondo grass
Hypoestes phyllostachya, polka dot plant
Saxifraga stolonifera, strawberry begonia
“Groundcovers”
Ficus pumila var. quercifolia, oak leaf creeping fig
Pilea glauca ‘Aquamarine’, friendship plant
The container is a plastic planting dish that’s 20 inches across by 8 inches deep. Because it is an indoor garden, the drainage holes remain plugged.
This garden uses regular bagged potting soil (not topsoil).
1. Fill the container with potting soil. Leave about 2 inches between the top of the container and the top of the soil. Lay the patio. Set the tile patio square on the soil where you’d like it in the container. Then top it with sand and use a foam brush to sweep sand into the cracks between the tiles. This is the “mortar” in the patio.
2. Place the door. The door is the anchoring accessory and a focal point in the garden. Everything else—plants and accessories—will be added to the garden in relation to the door and to the patio onto which it opens.
3. Position the plants. When you plant a garden this large, with so many plants and accessories, you’ll have to play around with placement. If you’re using a pool, you can set it on top of the soil to save the space while you position and plant the other plants. Save “digging in” the pool for last so that it doesn’t fill up with soil.
4. Plant the plants. Varying sizes and textures keep the plants from blending in to one another. There’s a reason why dwarf mondo grass is in almost every miniature garden—the grassy form is unlike almost any other plant suited to miniature gardening—most grasslike plants just aren’t small enough.
5. Place the pool. Wait until all plants are planted to place the pool and fill it. Otherwise, it will get soil and rocks in it. You can clean the pool by removing it and washing it in the sink. You can also suck out the water with a turkey baster, wipe the pool out with a towel, and then refill it.
6. Introduce accessories. The picnic table in this garden has been painted to add some color. Instead of setting it on a patio (tile or gravel), it is sitting on two creeping fig groundcover plants. I’m not a big fan of placing accessories right on bare soil, but neither do I want every single garden to be covered in gravel or mulch. Truly flat-growing groundcovers such as the oak-leafed fig bridges the gap.
7. Add pathways. Build your miniature garden like you’d build a full-sized garden. If you’d put a pathway between a patio and another seating area in your full-sized garden, put one in your miniature garden too. Pathways can add a sense of flow in a miniature garden. Your eye naturally moves from one seating area to the next, over the pathway. Water the garden until the soil is as damp as a wrung-out sponge.
Adding Finishing Touches
Take your miniature garden to the next level by adding accessories such as dishes, books, miniature coolers, and food. The newspaper and coffee cup sitting on the bistro table give the impression that someone just stepped away from the garden and will be right back. Larger gardens offer more space to include these types of accessories without overwhelming the plants.
A handmade ceramic birdbath next to the patio adds an artistic touch.
Plant small ferns in miniature urns to sit on the patio. Use an eyedropper or turkey baster to water these mini-gardens within the mini-garden.
Even miniature gardens need lighting. Instead of randomly placing a lantern, think about where someone sitting in the garden would most benefit from its light.
Many mini-gardens require little to no care, other than adding or changing accessories, once they’ve been planted. If you want to actually “tend” a little garden, this is the project for you. The Mini-Kitchen Garden uses herbs such as parsley and sage for the “trees” and polka dot plants (non-edible) for shrubs. Inside the tiny picket fence, there’s a pot-within-a-pot where you can plant seeds for microgreens. (You can buy microgreens at the store or at a farmers market, but they’re expensive.) My favorite accessory in this garden is the clothesline that holds the “Vegetables for Sale” sign. It was handmade by an Etsy artist, but was too large, in scale, for the other projects in this book. It blends perfectly with the rustic container for this garden.
This kitchen garden can sit on the kitchen counter or in the kitchen window, providing fresh herbs and microgreens, year-round.
Red is a unifying color throughout these accessories. Remember, you can repeat a color in accessories as well as plants to achieve repetition in the garden.
White picket fence
Miniature garden cloches
Handmade ladybug clothesline
Watering cans
Tiny loppers (hedge trimmers)
Terra cotta pots
Bucket
Wheelbarrow
Long-handled garden tools
Potting bench
Place a plastic liner inside a “found object” container if the container is not watertight or has gaps where soil could escape.
Plant your miniature kitchen garden with herbs.
Beets, turnips, mustard, and beans are all easy to grow as microgreens.
Select herbs to use as trees and shrubs in this miniature garden. Instead of the polka dot plant (used for shrubs in front of the fence), you could also plant thyme. I didn’t plant the chives because the container was too small, but they work well as indoor herbs and have a nice “grassy” look.
This container is a wooden basket made from branches coiled and nailed together. It has a slice of wood for the base. It’s quite sturdy; even when planted, you can still carry the garden around by the handle. You could plant a kitchen garden like this in any basket, as long as you put a plastic liner in it to hold the soil. A handle makes the garden easy to move around.
Use sterilized soilless seedling mix for this miniature garden to ensure quick germination of the microgreen seeds while avoiding fungal problems.
1. Place the liner in the basket and fill with potting soil up to 2 inches from the top. Poke holes in the bottom of a plastic container and fill it with soil. Sink it into the soil in the larger container so that the lip is just below the soil surface. The purpose of the “pot within a pot” is to make it easier to dig out and replace the soil where the microgreens are growing from time to time without disrupting all of the other plants.
2. Plant the larger plants around the plastic container that you buried in step 2.
3. Place the fence around the container so that you know where to “dig” to plant microgreen seeds. Use the tiny shovel (or the end of a pencil) to dig 1/4-inch furrows in the microgreen garden.
4. Sow the microgreens thickly in the garden and cover with 1/4 inch of the sterilized seedling mix. Water until the soil is about as damp as a wrung-out sponge. Keep the seeds moist as they are sprouting. You can use the spray bottle to mist them. That should provide enough water to keep them damp.
5. Place the accessories and wait for the microgreens to grow.
6. Use kitchen scissors to snip the microgreens off at the soil line when they have their first set of true leaves (which will look like the second set of leaves). You can resow in the same soil up to five or six times. (You only get one harvest from each sowing.)
Even if you live nowhere near the beach, you can still plant your own little paradise. This garden is a vacation in a pot. You can’t help but relax when you look at it. Small succulents stand in for their larger counterparts that natively grow along beaches. Tumbled glass mulch forms the water, while aquarium sand covers the beach. The featured plant in this garden is a screw pine seedling (they grow to be 15-foot-tall trees along the beaches in Florida), but you could also use a jade plant, aloe, or other large treelike succulent as a focal point.
Driftwood
Tumbled glass mulch
Seashells from the beach
Beach chair
Beach bucket filled with shells
Optional-beach umbrella (not pictured)
If you’ve gone on a beach vacation and brought back shells or sea glass that you didn’t know where to put, your problem is solved. Now you can create a garden to showcase your beachcombing treasures. In a miniature garden larger shells look more like creatures from the deep than diminutive mollusks. To fill a beach bucket in scale with other beach furniture you need to look for teeny tiny shells no longer than your pinky fingernail.
All of the plants used in this garden, with the exception of the screw pine (Pandanus spp.) are succulents. The finished garden was planted with hens and chickens (Sempervivum spp.) next to the beach chair. Haworthia spp. plants on the right side of the screw pine look like the big agaves you often see growing along beaches and dunes. Assorted 1-inch succulents with blue-toned leaves are planted in the “water” section of the garden.
When selecting a “specimen” tree, look for plants that can tolerate the same dry conditions as the succulents.
Place a liner inside the container.
The metal container did not have drainage holes, so I poked holes in a clear liner and used it inside the metal pan. This container is 12 inches in diameter, but the same style is available in larger and smaller sizes.
Add perlite to potting soil to create a lightweight mix suitable for succulents.
A tall and grasslike screw pine is the star plant of this grouping.
1. Start by poking holes in the liner container. This will allow some drainage in this indoor garden without water dripping through onto your dining room table.
2. Mix the soil by adding one part perlite to two parts potting soil.
3. Place the liner in the container and fill the container with the perlite-amended potting mix.
4. Place the largest plant, the screw pine, in the pot.
5. Arrange the other plants around the screw pine (or other specimen plant) to check spacing before removing them from their pots. Once you’re satisfied with spacing, go ahead and plant them.
6. Add the tumbled glass “mulch” for the water. I used larger pieces to outline and smaller pieces between the plants.
7. Use a soup spoon to fill in the “beach” with aquarium sand from the pet store. Aquarium sand is coarser in texture than playground sand and is intended to be around plants and water.
8. Place the furniture and accessories.
Keep an Eye on the Details
Even within a relatively small garden, there is still room for little vignettes. On one side of the screw pine there’s a beach chair and shell bucket. Little sand toys would be cute additions to this area.
I looked all over for a small umbrella that wasn’t a paper cocktail umbrella, but couldn’t find one. Are you crafty? You might enjoy making your own.
Don’t you just want to spend a relaxing afternoon in this little beach chair?
Different haworthia plants represent the large century plants (Agave spp.) seen growing along the dunes in coastal areas.
