Planning a fairy garden

Some fairy gardens start with a single item already in the garden or given as a gift: an old toy truck you dig up or a purpose-built tiny cottage your neighbour brings to tea. But if you’ve decided to start a fairy garden from scratch, there are some things you’ll need to decide on.

Indoor or outdoor

You can certainly have both, but if you need to decide, think about what’s going into the fairy garden. An indoor fairy garden will need a certain amount of sunlight to grow plants. (This is a gardening magazine, and we won’t be considering plastic plants here.) An outdoor fairy garden will have to weather the rain and wind, and it will probably need to be stored for winter.

Scale

The most common scale for purpose-built fairy furniture and items is 1 inch equals 12 inches, or 1:12. There are smaller sizes, too, like 1:24 (half-inch) and 1:48 (quarterinch).

Some items aren’t built on a specific scale, but you can fudge it. For instance, an adult female fairy at 1:12 would be about 5 inches high; at 1:24, she would be about 2.5 inches high. If you have a fairy that is 3.5 inches high, what scale is she? That’s up to you. I would probably put her in the 1:12 scale because she’ll look cute as a smaller fairy.

If you decide to build fairy items, having a scale in mind will be useful. If you figure an actual door is about 7 feet high, you would build your popsicle-stick house around a door that is about 7 inches high. That said, you’ll find that a typical manufactured fairy house has a 6-inch door. Maybe this is because shorter doors bring to mind older English cottages? Who knows.

Purchased or homemade

If you have a few hours to kill, Google “fairy garden supplies”. There are many, many manufacturers. Add to that, the supplies for model railroad gardens (which are in a scale of 1:22) and doll houses. There is a good chance that what you want, you can buy.

If you purchase, most items are made from plastic or resin. Some are made from clay or metal. And aside from the materials to choose from, there is the style they are made in. Do you want chubby, child-like fairies or slender goth fairies? (Yes, there are goth fairies!)

You can also make your own furniture, houses and fences out of wood, wire, polymer clay or whatever you’d like. If you are artistic, go ahead!

Plants

Alpine plants are ideal for fairy gardens; they’re small and don’t spread too quickly. Look for tiny sedums and thrift, ageratum and Delosperma, or ice plant. Little sprigs of cotoneaster make good shrubs. Scotch and Irish moss make great groundcovers and chia makes lovely grass. There are a handful of small hostas to watch for, like ‘Mouse Ears’ and ‘Cracker Crumbs’. Small-leaf succulents are also good.

When choosing plants, consider how much effort you’re willing to put in. Some plants are slow-growing and don’t require much attention. Others require almost constant upkeep, from tiny amounts of water to steadfast trimming. Is your fairy garden just for show, or do you want to tend a tiny garden in microcosm?

Guiding principle

Here is something nobody talks about online, but it is crucial to me. What is the fiction of the world you are creating? Do the fairies have their own miniature world, where pets are tiny? Or do they live in our world, building things out of real-sized items? In the second case, a sparrow would be the size of an eagle for five-inch tall fairy, and a grain of rice would be like a baked potato for the tiniest fairy. For pets they might have butterflies or lady bugs because there are no itty-bitty cats and dogs.

Breaking the rules

Of course, this is your garden. You make the rules. Have comparatively giant fairies and little houses and inch-long bunnies cavorting. Trust your judgement. Do you think it’s cute? Then it is!