Fairy Gardens

At first I thought this activity might be more ‘craft’ than process art, which, it’s fine to do a craft every once in a while, but I do try to stick with ‘here are the materials, lets see what we can do with them’, rather than ‘lets see if we can all make a butterfly with dot markers’. But fairy gardening was very much process.

Everyone had some kind of container with dirt, and a flat of mixed fairy-scale plants and a twig chair.

There were also different kinds of rocks, some slices of logs, more twigs, and Renae brought some lovely lichen covered twigs and berries.

And my recycling bin and a glue gun for general construction. The glue gun was very popular, and I’m thinking that I should get another one, or two! This is Ellie, glueing black rocks in a spiral around her pink paper cup for a fairy house.

Ellie’s Garden


Here you can see the paper cup Ellie was working on, that is featured in the center of her garden, along with a black stone path.

Right now I am really wishing that I had written down a description of their garden from each of them! Because it would be way more interesting than anything I can come up with.

Alina’s Garden

Alina needed markers for her garden. If you look closely you will see that every stepping stone has hearts drawn on it. Also all the tables say ‘I love you’. There are berries sprinkled around for snacking, and a handy cork chair at the table. The house in the center was made by her mom, and the pink house at the back is her creation, made from the bottom half of a pink bubble-blow solution container. There was good recycling this week!

Penelope K.


There is a mirror here (Renae brought mirrors too, it’s all coming back slowly!) stood upright for little fairies to admire themselves in. Also she was very firm in arguments with her mother that the fairy bath (I found some bowls at Goodwill), must rest upon a curled up vine pedestal. After some artistic differences Renae split off to work on her own garden. I was supposed to be sharing with my Penelope too, but if you look closely in the first picture you can see a smashed fairy chair just above her head, so instead I got her a plastic bin with a pile of dirt and a shovel, because that’s really what she needed!

Rebecca’s Garden


Rebecca’s garden has three structures, an indoor/outdoor pool with a removable ‘Miracle Bubbles!’ roof (she got the top half of the contested pink container), a raspberry container full of wool roving and a fairy tower she assembled from a pink paper cup, wool roving and a cut up water bottle (unusual find in our recycling!) The wool roving was all to make soft nests for the fairies to sleep in, I think she is hoping some will really move in. She also has a standing mirror and a table plentifully supplied with fairy snacks.

Next up, the mom’s gardens!

Renae’s Garden

Renae spent quite a while working on her fairy house, made out of wine corks and a lovely collection of lichen and found natural objects. Then when it didn’t really fit into Penelope K’s garden (Yes, we have two Penelope’s now…) added to their other artistic disagreements, Renae moved out into an empty plant flat and scavenged left over plants to decorate it. (Awful photo, sorry! I spent too much time playing then rushed the pictures.) I’ve been told that her fairy garden left the flat and was transplanted into the real garden, where it will hopefully thrive with real fairies. If there are real fairies they are probably at Renae’s house.

Chris’s Garden

Chris knew from the beginning that she and Ellie were going to need separate gardens! This was a project that the Mom’s were at least as interested in as the girls. 🙂

Here is the reading corner, complete with fairy books made out of stones, and an ottoman made from half an avocado pit covered in some wool fabric.

And here is a close up of her totally adorable twig door with overhanging lichen set into a hill side.

My (Katherine’s) Garden

It is totally not fair, but I spent a lot more time styling my garden and photographing it over the next several days. It was so much fun! I scattered lantana flowers, picked the dirt out of the moss, staged the furniture… Please come look around!

Let’s peek over the edge. Oh, the blue star creeper is blooming!

Step up onto the Irish moss carpet, and you can see the thyme tree in the background. If you sit under it I am pretty sure the summer will last forever. (I turned a thyme plant into a ‘tree’ by pruning and braiding six strands. I considered kidnapping one of my husband’s bonsai…)

Turn around and you can follow the flower strewn path leading over a mossy hill.

On the other side of the hill is a stone terraced cafe, serving very small cherry tomatoes. I think you can get some flower cups of dew as well. Although there is no house in my garden, I would like to move in anyway! I will sleep in the beds of starry flowers.

Here is a much less romantic overview shot so you can see how it is laid out. It is small, but it is so much fun to photograph different views!

Look over your shoulder as you leave for one last glimpse through the thyme tree of a fairy repast. Goodbye!

See more fairy gardens at The Magic Onion’s 2011 fairy garden competition!

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Thanks! We had a lot of fun building them. I can’t figure out how to comment on tumblr, maybe I need an account, but it looks like you have been building with a lot of fun materials!

What a lovely project! I love the real living fairy gardens!
I was wondering if you would be willing to share some of the plants that you’ve found work best in a fairy garden?
Thank you for sharing this amazing project!

I’m not really an expert on this yet, I’m not sure which plants are going to thrive and which are going to die out. Well, it’s pretty hard to kill thyme, so I think I’m set there. But I’ve already killed some of the Irish moss, I took it out to play and left it out on a hot day and some of it got a sun burn, even though it can take full sun I guess our sun was a little much. I would have liked to use real moss, (Irish moss isn’t actually moss, but a low plant) because it is harder to kill. What I did was go to the local hardware store and basically buy a little bit of all the low growing plants that they had. Which was ‘baby tears’, (I like it and seems to be doing well), ‘Irish moss’ (looks nice like fairy grass, not sure how it is going to work long term), ‘blue star creeper’ (very pretty tiny flowers, tiny leaves, seems to be doing well so far), ‘herenaria green carpet’ (makes lovely tiny bushy evergreens, seems to be doing well.) But I am sure there are many other choices, depending on where you live.

Thanks so much! It was one of our more involving projects, with most of the girls working for an hour or more, which is something for 4-5 year olds!

I cannot wait until my granddaughter Lily is big enough to make these with me! My grandma used to tell me that the little dewy spiderwebs that you find outside in the mornings were hammocks woven by the fairies so that they could sleep under the stars! Hope to pass on these memories to Lily!

Thanks! My two year old likes to go around and water all the fairy gardens. Mine, unfortunately, got left out in the sun and all the irish moss died, so I tried to rebuild with what was left in the actual garden. One of our friends who built the fairy gardens with us too them home and transferred them to the border on the shady side of their house, a much more resilient location than a pot!

There are so many beautiful fairy gardens that people make, I love looking at them all. Honestly, I play with them more than my children do though!

Thanks! It is a Nikon D300, and I was most likely shooting with my ancient 30mm f2 lens, stopped down of course (2/3 sensor, so 45mm equivalent). These days I’m getting lazy and just shooting with my iPhone!

Just from the local garden center, I think I went to Lowes and SumerWinds. But anywhere with a decent selection of plants should work fine.

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