Looking for a cheap and cheerful activity to do with the grand children during the holidays or a talking point for your garden? Why not build a fairy garden.
Have you ever wondered who buys those little fairy houses/solar lights that major grocery stores and garden centres haul out each spring with the tomato seedlings and passionfruit vines and more importantly, what they actually do with them?
Well, for the past couple of years as a brightly coloured mango with jaunty windows or an avocado with a yellow and white awning has found itself reduced to clear, it has then been domiciled in my trolley and carried home to be shoved into a pot with the lemon tree or herbs.
They’re a bit of lighting in a dark backyard and a chance to fulfill my delusion that I’m actually rebuilding the fairy garden I’ve started a few times over the past 30 years. Mostly they’re a quirky talking point basically forgotten until you need some thyme from the garden at 8.30pm at night and a luminous pumpkin lights the way.
All but forgotten, until a recent garden discovery saw me collect them and all of the other “talking” points dotted around my garden – collected over three decades – and funnel them in to one project.
The discovery was that fuchsia’s – often finicky in our climate – grow surprisingly well on my front verandah. It was a discovery of neglect and working too hard – plants bought for a back garden that I didn’t get round plant out the back to starting thriving despite no effort where they were plonked on the front verandah.
Fuschia’s love a little morning sun, lots of light through the day, not a lot of wind and a shaded spot in the afternoon. And after losing my first collection to my husband’s “I’m just taking the shade cloth off to a few days” –when we first moved in here (and it’s still not back 29 years later), that discovery quickly saw two scraggly fuchsias turn into four, turn into eight.
Suddenly the beautiful skirts of these colourful blooms were dancing like fairies over the sand and moss patch under the too shady pines in front of my house. My daughter called them dancing fairies during their often short-lived stays in parts of my garden ill-suited for the job but serving as fuchsia spots due to wishful thinking and a lot of crossed fingers.
Looking at them, the light-bulb went off and I quickly found the concrete mushrooms I bought in Handorf, South Australia, decades ago and all the little houses I’d squirreled away around the garden. My treasure hunt proved rewarding (and came as the resin houses were out and about again in stores) and suddenly I was weeding the last of the lame looking grass out of the moss and sand near our steps (a surreal experience).
The Big Guy (my husband not Santa – though as he gets older the lines are blurring looks wise) happily surrendered the spot to a tiny garden and then realising it was less lawn to mow, started suggesting I take the whole corner.
The young kids across the road, who we virtually only check in on while waiting for Santa on his fire truck on Christmas Eve but we always promise to do something with in the New Year, were invited over to paint little bits of fences. They are coming back to paint pots next and the youngest (and only girl) has been in with her mum to put some colourful mushrooms in our garden. Our next door neighbours have called over the fence or stopped us in the shopping centre to chat about it as it’s grown.
The nice thing is with many of the dollar stores stocking furniture or fairy craft items and plenty of tutorials on You Tube for making simple furniture or elaborate gardens, putting a little patch of magic isn’t hard or even expensive. There are also groups on Facebook you can join to get tips or show off your garden.
While a fairy garden can be anything you want – from a couple of pots painted with houses to what ever it is that is developing in my garden- tor me it was particularly important that it be a functioning flower garden as well.
The fuchsias have been joined by portulacas, lobelias, snap dragons, paper daisies and even a strawberry plant but really it’s up to you (and what suits your climate and aspect) as to what you do and what you plant.
And of course you, are only limited by your imagination (and that of your grand kids or bored young neighbours) as to what you create.
It was kind of nice to have my 20 somethings paint faces and fairy doors with their young neighbours but the best bit was to see two frazzled mother’s of young children, whose husbands are FIFO, sit and relax and paint too – a paint and sip but without really leaving home. We’ve been there and know how hard it can be and how much a tiny bit of respite and support is appreciated. And so it’s been nice to grow a garden and a little community around it.
