Fairy Gardening: Creating Your Own Magical Miniature Garden
Julie Bowden-Davis and Beverly Turner (2013)
As I began to explore the idea of creating a fairy garden at the Clarkesville Library Children’s Garden, I came across a clever book on the subject. Julie Bowden-Davis is a gardening writer and Beverly Turner is an authority on fairy gardening with skill as a theatrical designer.
Their book is a well-organized and thoroughly interesting. The subject may not be on the wish list of all gardeners, but any avid gardener who is a parent or grandparent may find this book useful and a good way to introduce gardening to small children.
The nine chapters cover how to design a successful fairy garden. Topics include: Developing a Theme; Designing a Captivating Focal Point, Accessorizing Your Miniature Landscape, Creating Action, Telling a Story; Selecting a Container; Suitable Miniature Plants, and Planting and Maintaining Your Garden. The book’s chapter on miniature plants is sectioned into sun-loving and shade-loving plants will be in the sun and they listed by whether they are suitable as miniature trees, shrubs, or groundcovers. Photographs in the book show fairy gardens that illustrate the chapter themes and miniature plants.
The authors also include “Mini-Tips” throughout the book that provide practical guidance and ideas about how to use common objects to create your accessories. Some of these “Mini-Tips” include: Scaling Your Garden, Accessories Using Sand, Use of Succulents to Create Mini-Planters, How to Make Birds and Butterflies Fly and How to Create a Kite.
This book provides a list of sources for miniature figures, accessories, and plants. In sum, this book is a thorough and engaging fairy garden resource.
Holly Sparrow, Headwaters Master Gardener