Fairy Gardens

In 2005, about ten years after I started the Family Garden Trains to help garden railroaders get off to a good start, a reader asked if I had any content about Fairy Gardens. At the time I didn't even know what they were. Now it's a big fad, if the $40-$100 fairy garden accessories at Meijer store is any indication. Shelia started one a little over a year ago, but we haven't exactly gone "hog wild" with it yet.

The current fad has been a boon for garden railroaders, because some nurseries are carrying more miniature plants than they used to. An April, 2017 trip to Meadow View Growers, a large nursery near New Carlisle Ohio had us drooling over their offerings - Shelia for her fairy garden, me for the garden railroad I'll be building at the house we moved to in late 2016.

How Big Are Fairies, Really?

If you've been around fairy gardens at all, you know that scale isn't exactly - can we say - critical. That's okay, though. Real-world fairies come in all shapes and sizes, too. In fact, during the middle ages and Renaissance, fairies were as big as people (remember Titania falling for enchanted, but full-sized Bottom in Midsummer Night's Dream?). And they were far more dangerous than modern fairies. The wood-elves of The Hobbit - the novel, not the movies - were based on several fairy legends, if that helps you picture what people really thought of "the Fair Folk" back in the day. And a fairy garden was the last place you wanted to spend any time, eat anything set before you, or - worst of all - take a nap. Yes, "Rip Van Winkle" is a "toned-down" version of another old fairy legend.

It wasn't until Andrew Lang and others started repackaging the old myths for children in the late 1800s that fairies started becoming little and cute and usually nice. Walt Disney handled that transition nicely in Sleeping Beauty by having his fairies (almost) human-sized when they need to interact with humans and tiny when they needed to hide or sneak into a dungeon.

Nowadays, of course, most fairies are small and charming and nice, except when they're michievous like Tinkerbell (in the play, not in the children's cartoons). And it's only natural to want to give them nice places to hang out. I understand, though, that, like the Great Pumpkin, they will only come to gardens that are really sincere. So the important thing isn't that you have the best stuff or even the fanciest plants, but that you do everything with love.