What is the most fun about miniature gardening? The plants? The accessories? It’s impossible to decide. It’s all fun!
Miniature gardening is a way to garden, indoors and out, when space, time, or seasons are limited or when “regular” full-sized outdoor gardening isn’t enough to fuel the fire of the imagination. With miniature gardening, you can create entire worlds in just a square foot or two of a container or a spot carved out in your big garden. It’s like playing dollhouse but in an oasis of green instead of inside a wooden or plastic structure.
This type of gardening isn’t limited to creating little worlds where a fairy or a small hobbit might find respite. It’s also a way to enjoy plants (such as water plants or succulents) that require different conditions than your main garden can provide or to introduce variety to your landscape on a small and affordable scale.
Once you try it, you’ll find yourself hooked. I was.
I have always loved plants. I had a garden when I was six or seven. At the end of the season, my dad would dig up that year’s asparagus fern so that I could grow it in a big terra cotta pot situated next to my west-facing bedroom window. I went to a lot of day camps when I was little. The highlight of one of them (who remembers which one now? not me) was when we made terrariums with gallon-and-a-half pickle jars. I’m not sure how long I had that terrarium, but I clearly remember sitting in the alcove of the school where the camp was being held, shoveling soil into the wide mouth of that jar.
Years later, I commandeered a fish bowl to make another terrarium. I used a clear glass plate from the restaurant where I worked as a lid for the terrarium. It sat in the area of my parents’ house that was supposed to be a wet bar, but I had turned it into my “greenhouse.” It had a sink, a counter, and big windows. Pity to waste that on a bar!
I grew all sorts of things in my little “greenhouse” until I went to college. Fast forward to many years later. I was in the middle of working on my first book (Beginner’s Illustrated Guide to Gardening, Cool Springs Press). Instead of shooting photos in the hot blast-furnace atmosphere of my front yard, I went terrarium-crazy in the air-conditioned interior of my home. I planted small terrariums and Wardian cases and hanging terrariums. My husband thought I’d lost my mind. We had terrariums all over the house.
The peril of being a garden writer is that sometimes during the busy season you don’t have enough time to actually garden. With miniature gardening, there’s never a problem. Thirty seconds to water and a minute to clip some errant vines to prevent them from taking over, and you’re done for the day. The rest of the time you can just admire your work. In a miniature garden or terrarium, you can get so much satisfaction, exercise so much control, and accomplish much more in a shorter amount of time than with any other type of gardening.
Miniature gardening (or mini-gardening), fairy gardening, terrarium-building, and aerium constructing are all just ways of making little landscapes or little scenes out of plants and, sometimes, accessories. In mini-gardening, you’re telling a story, setting a stage, inviting intrigue and imagination to take over where the planting leaves off.
When you’re finished planting your creation, you will have something other than just a collection of plants. You will have conjured a sense of possibility.
While you will plant many of your mini-gardens in containers, these little gardens aren’t really container gardens the way you’d normally think of container gardens. You’re not using plants as “thrillers,” “fillers,” and “spillers” to create a balanced look for pretty patio color. While mini-gardening you’ll be repurposing plants that were previously annuals, perennials, or houseplants to serve as “trees” and “shrubs,” using groundcovers as “grass,” and finding the smallest, most dwarf version of your favorite flowering plants to add color to your mini-garden.
In the end, you’ll have something that looks quite like your front yard or garden, only it will be smaller in diameter than the opening of a half–whiskey barrel.
To make a miniature garden that looks like a small-scale landscape, you have to know a little bit about design. Design? What? Not me! It’s a word that strikes fear in the hearts of many a gardener, but it need not. The same types of design principles that you use to create your full-sized garden will come in handy when you’re planting your mini-garden. Chapter 1 goes into great detail about design. Here’s a preview, though.
There are five key design areas that you’ll learn about:
• Scale
• Contrast
• Repetition
• Focal point
• Theme
If you create your garden thinking only about those five principles, you’ll be good to go. You will also find, I think, that you’ll naturally employ these principles when creating a miniature garden, because the miniature garden will look so much better to your casual eye when you use them.
This garden demonstrates all of the design principles you’ll learn about. Notice, in particular, the repetition of the contrasting chartreuse color of the miniature conifer dwarf Hinoki cypress, Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Golden Sprite’, next to the white statue and the sedum growing in front of the miniature hosta.
For instance, when choosing plants, you’ll find that you have to put a burgundy-leafed plant next to a light green-leafed plant, or some gravel, or a light-colored accessory; otherwise, it won’t show up. That’s the principle of contrast.
What all of the design principles really do is help you avoid ending up with a big blob of green in the container, as opposed to a miniature landscape design.
Miniature gardening is the same as container gardening. Wait—didn’t I just finish telling you that miniature gardening is not the same as container gardening? It is different in terms of the outcome of the garden, what you’re hoping for in the finished product: a scene rather than a big riot of color.
Miniature gardening is the same as container gardening in terms of the factors you have to consider when selecting and combining plants. Because everything is planted relatively close together in a miniature garden, you have to plant “like with like.” This refers to the conditions that plants in the mini-garden need in order to grow.
Like with like means:
• Sun plants with sun plants
• Shade plants with shade plants
• High-water-use plants with high-water-use plants
• Succulents and low-water-use plants with other low-water-use plants
One of the projects in the book is a miniature outdoor water garden. This incorporates plants that need wet soil, which is usually not present in a lot of gardens without intervention from the gardener. The plants used for the project all grow well in full to partial sun and need moist soil around their roots. They’ve thrived in the little “microclimate” I provided for them while other drought-lovers flourish in absurdly well-drained soil in the ground around them.
First of all, it really isn’t that complicated. Once you start, you’ll find yourself scouting for—and finding—plants, containers, accessories, and ideas everywhere you go. But the careful consideration and time needed to track down the right plants, containers, and “set pieces” is so worth it if you:
• Want to create a unique conversation piece
• Enjoy fun, hands-on projects
• Have limited time or space to garden
• Are mobility-challenged
• Want to grow plants that aren’t well suited to your natural garden climate
• Live somewhere with long, hot summers or long, freezing winters
• Have kids or grandkids
• Want to try something different
I enjoy miniature gardening because it lets me add my personality to the gardens. Here, I have a replica of my beloved purple BARK paddleboard and Kialoa paddle “floating” above my “Under the Sea” garden. A ceramic beagle (representing my dog Jack Daniels, who likes to paddle with me) stands on the board.
You’ll hear miniature gardening and fairy gardening discussed interchangeably. Technically, I guess they’re about the same thing: creating tiny landscapes. The accessories and furniture are, for the most part, what turn a miniature garden into a landscape. A plant doesn’t necessarily serve as a tree until a little bench is set underneath it (providing scale). Some people say that fairy gardens have to have little fairies in them, while others say that the garden must only be set up and look inviting to any fairies that might be flitting around.
Whether you add a fairy to the garden or not is entirely up to you. Your choice of plants, containers, and accessories will depend more on where you’re planning to put the miniature garden than on whether a fairy will perch on one of the chairs or benches.
The projects in this book illustrate how to create some of the most popular types of miniature gardens. Reading about these and trying your hand at creating some of them will give you ideas for designing your own. The sky’s the limit.
Indoor miniature gardens are planted with houseplants or plants that can tolerate (or even thrive) in relatively low-light, indoor conditions. Containers for indoor miniature gardens are usually plastic, glass, or metal, and might be nestled inside another container that hides a drainage pan. Indoor miniature gardens can be placed outside during the summer but are indoors all winter.
A variation on the indoor miniature garden, terrariums are (usually) enclosed clear-glass containers planted with plants that like high humidity and lower light conditions. Terrariums do not have to be fully enclosed. Simply planting in a container with tall walls, such as a hurricane-style vase, elevates the humidity for the plants inside. Fully enclosed terrariums are self-sustaining ecosystems, requiring little, if any, extra water.
Think of an aerium as an open terrarium for air plants. The glass container helps elevate the humidity for the air plants, which contrary to common knowledge, actually do require some moisture to live. In general, aeriums are drier than terrariums, though, and are planted with different plants. They also require more frequent watering than terrariums that are fully enclosed.
The outdoor miniature gardens projects in this book describe how to create an outdoor miniature or fairy garden in a container. Most of the outdoor gardens will contain plants that are hardy to the area in which they are planted and will survive the winter in the container outside. Outdoor gardens can be brought in for a few days to serve as a centerpiece, but the plants in them are happier when they stay outside most of the time. Accessories for outdoor gardens need to be more durable, as well—resisting rust, corrosion, and water damage.
You can plant a mini-garden in situ (Latin for “in position”) in the middle of your regular full-sized garden using the same types of plants and accessories you’d gather for an outdoor miniature container garden. Because they stay in place, these gardens are planted mostly with hardy perennials or dwarf trees or shrubs, with some annuals thrown in for color. If you like to collect miniature conifers, an in-situ garden is a good choice.
A fairy garden in a 4-inch pot is small enough for a child’s bedside table or bedroom windowsill but large enough to include a few fun accessories.
A kid’s miniature garden using recycled materials, including baby food jars and lids.
If you have kids or grandkids, miniature gardening is one way to keep them occupied for hours. You can go different routes: make terrariums with recycled glass jars, make permanent fairy gardens that the kids can grow for the summer, or make temporary fairy “gardens” with items they collect around the yard.
A miniature garden doesn’t have to be large for children to enjoy it. You can make one in a small pot, add a little animal or accessory, and still have a pint-sized scene that a child can enjoy tending. (By making a smaller garden with fewer plants, they’re also more likely to have better luck maintaining it.)
The San Francisco Flower and Garden Show has a miniature garden contest for kids. Individuals and classrooms or clubs compete. They seem to always come up with fascinating designs and themes, from “crop gardens” demonstrating agricultural products in different countries, to bee gardens, to miniature “vegetable” gardens.
Fairy gardening doesn’t have to be fancy to be fun, but it will tickle the fancy of almost all children, boys and girls, and ignite their imaginations.
Everything from here on will teach you the basics of creating miniature gardens and fairy gardens to grow indoors or out. There are some projects, tips, hints, and lots of photos to inspire you.
Once you have the basics down, use your imagination to create enchanting gardens that only you can dream up.
