Fairy Garden

I have long wanted to make one of those broken pot fairy gardens.

I was a bit inspired to make this happen by George's Stumpy the Gnome post.

Recently I broke one of my pots... completely by accident. Perfect!

I love taking broken things and making them into art (see my shoji aquarium).

I finally put my mind to it and made this little fairy garden come together.

It's just an invitation and a place to be for the little folk. We'll see if I get any fey visitors in the days to come.

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I had to break the broken bits a bit more to get them to fit inside as a retaining wall. I also needed a secondary pot to hold the soil in the bottom. I used coco coir to fill gaps. The soil fill is from under my gravel area, I dug out a bunch to plant out some blueberries, and it's full of small rocks and low quality soil. Perfect.



I picked some moss off of another area of the gravel and kept it as intact as possible to make a fairy lawn.

I lashed some bits of sticks together to make a ladder. My son put the slide in, so I found a thin chestnut dud... one of the little slim ones that's no good for eating, and I put it by the slide. Maybe the fairies will use it to protect their bums from the bumpy rock slide.



I looked around for some good sitting rocks and put in a stone slab for a table. I had to stabilize it with some moss to keep it from being too tippy to hold my guests' food and drink. I found some turkey tail mushroom caps for seat cushions and some empty snail shells for drinking horns.

L. Johnson wrote: Recently I broke one of my pots... completely by accident.

This is me, every week, as--alas!--I am the clumsiest person I know!  But it's reassuring to be reminded that if I'm clever or resourceful enough, the broken thing can add an extra dimension to another project. The daydreaming that caused the break can be of service in reusing the object, ha!

Your set-up looks elegant and mysterious. Are the fairies in Japan very different from Irish and English ones, or are they all tricksters and jokers with an occasional benevolent streak?

I wonder how I would set up a tiny garden for American fairies. *Daydreams...*

Rachel Lindsay wrote:Your set-up looks elegant and mysterious. Are the fairies in Japan very different from Irish and English ones, or are they all tricksters and jokers with an occasional benevolent streak?

I wonder how I would set up a tiny garden for American fairies. *Daydreams...*

Let's just say... I wouldn't want to invite most Japanese "yokai" into my garden. I'm hoping I brought some pixies, sprites, or house elves with me from the west.

It's a beautiful little garden and has a perfectly welcoming air to it.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of any yokai. As my husband likes to say (in reference to something else), the only difference between a Japanese oni and kami is the opinion of the viewer - the spirits are perfectly happy with whatever label we have for them.
To be fair, I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of a brownie, pixie, or sprite, either. All that energy and magic for threshing fields of grain or putting up barns over night could mean bad things for the humans in the path. Boggarts are unkind brownies, according to many stories.

I appreciate the repurposing of broken pots and how you used what you had, or could easily craft, to make a perfect playground for little things. I hope the moss grew and the garden shows some slight signs of use - unless it's been repurposed for something else. I have some broken bits and pieces around and ... yeah. A toad home for one of them and maybe a fairy garden - if I can get things to fit.
Thank you for the very motivating process of creation!

The moss grows! and grows... and the succulents do too... they need to be mowed, but mowing isn't really something the fairies seem to do.

They overturned the table and threw the cups around though. Must have been a raucous party. My son wanted to make a swing for them, but it didn't happen, so we haven't seen any more action lately. I'm sure though that if we build it again, they will come to enjoy.