Adventures in Fairyland—Gardening With Tiny Plants, Tools, and People
Plants & Gardens News Volume 18, Number 3 | Fall/Winter 2003
by Ilene Sternberg
Have you noticed "wee folk" running loose in people's gardens lately? Horticultural "pixilation" seems to be quite chic these days. Why are fairies, elves, pixies, devas, fauns, brownies, gnomes, trolls, sylphs, sprites, and spirits suddenly invading our backyards? Weren't squirrels and voles enough of a challenge?
With Tolkien's hobbits taking over Hollywood and Harry Potter flying out of bookstores faster than the Hogwart Express, the fairy-garden phenomenon may be part of a general trend in popular culture toward the fantastical. Revived interest in herbalism may also be spurring curiosity about plant mysticism and lore. Whatever the reason, gardens are rife with fairy life—or at least fiberglass representations of it.
For much of human history, fairies, in one form or another—wood nymphs, dryads, demons, and so on—were part of our basic belief systems. They came in all shapes and sizes and performed deeds both of great kindness and savagery (abductions were a fairy specialty). In Freudian terms, they were projections of our deepest fears and desires.
Somewhere along the way, though, the fairies lost out to organized religion and enlightened thinking and mostly disappeared (though some academics argue that fairy lore has been transmogrified into the cult of the extraterrestrial). Nowadays, in people's minds, there's not much left of the fairy pantheon, just a small subdivision of diminutive, garden-variety pucks and puckettes.
A Victorian Legacy
These tiny, innocuous (some would say effete) creatures found a semblance of immortality through the ever-popular Flower Fairies books of Cicely Mary Barker. Starting in the 1920s, Barker created eight volumes filled with illustrations of, and poems about, pint-sized fairies frolicking inside and among botanically correct flowers. Barker was influenced by the Victorian enthusiasm for fairy stories and, no doubt, by Louisa May Alcott's Flower Fables of 1854.
"The summer moon shone brightly down upon the sleeping earth, while far away from mortal eyes danced the Fairy folk," reads the introduction to Alcott's book. "Fire-flies hung in bright clusters on the dewy leaves, that waved in the cool night-wind; and the flowers stood gazing, in very wonder, at the little Elves, who lay among the fern-leaves, swung in the vine-boughs, sailed on the lake in lily cups, or danced on the mossy ground, to the music of the hare-bells, who rung out their merriest peal in honor of the night."
C'mon now. That's really sweet, isn't it?
The Victorian fad for flower fairies wasn't confined to literary circles, either. Even the great educator and agricultural researcher George Washington Carver, unquestionably a practical man, had a soft spot for the little folk.
"When I touch that flower, I am touching infinity," he wrote. "Through the flower, I talk to the Infinite, which is only a silent force. This is not a physical contact. It is not the earthquake, wind, or fire. It is the invisible world. It is that small voice that calls up the fairies."
Carver's fairies were undoubtedly peanut-sized.
Today, there are those who still take their fairies quite seriously. For example, members of the Findhorn Community (www.findhorn.org) in northeastern Scotland claim to communicate with nature spirits. They even run events and spiritual retreats so that others can experience the same.
And in her book, The Elves of Lily Hill Farm (Llewellyn Publications, 1997), Penny Kelly describes the lessons she has learned from the devas and elves who inhabit her Michigan garden. She even shows us sketches she's made of them.
Miniature Statues and Gardens
But for most people living this side of never-never land, a fairy garden is simply a whimsical miniature landscape with elfin plants, often designed on the same scale as a model-railway garden, or even tinier. It's a rare thing to see an entire garden given over to the fairies. A quiet corner usually suffices. Or sometimes fairy-gardeners will plant their entire "smurfer's paradise" in a trough or planter—picture a terrarium without the bottle. (Note: Pixies don't like being cooped up in bottles; they turn into evil genies and wreak havoc with your miniature roses.)
Fairy-garden enthusiasts find itsy-bitsy trowels and teensy-weensy garden hoses in craft stores and dollhouse furniture catalogs to incorporate into their mini landscapes. And instead of waiting for actual fairies to arrive and take up residence in their hobbity habitats, they purchase fairy statuary. (Two online sources for fairy-garden figurines and hardscape are sitnshop.net/statuaryfairies.shtml and efairies.com.)
As far as design goes, fairy gardens take their cue from bonsai gardens or the Vietnamese miniature landscape art of hon non bo. They also get inspiration from rock gardeners, who have long been crawling around on beleaguered knees pruning their plants with cuticle scissors and grooming their dwarf conifers with chopsticks.
Imagine a lilliputian village, arranged around a dwarf river birch tree, Betula nigra 'Little King'. Couched on a bed of sphagnum moss, the village's pinecone-shingled houses are furnished with tiny twig chairs for brownies to sit upon while they leaf through their abridged copies of Peter Pan. Welcome signs at the entrance to the village read "Sunshine fades, stars appear, garden fairies gather here," or "You are now entering Pixie Park: population 5." You get the idea.
Most fairy-gardeners assert that they're doing all this for their children or grandchildren, but we know better.
Favorite Fairy Flowers
Particular plants twine through fairy folklore. The wee ones are summoned to their midnight revels and dances by bluebells. In fact, bell-shaped flowers of any kind are appropriate. Pixies are especially fond of ferns and primroses. Foxgloves—also known as fairy thimbles, fairy caps, and fairy petticoats—are said to be a gift from the fairies to foxes, who wear the flowers on their foxy little paws so they don't get caught raiding the chicken coop. However, some argue that "foxglove" is a corruption of "folk's glove," and that the flowers are actually worn by the elves themselves.
Poppy petals make lovely fairy shawls for cool evenings. Infant elves sleep inside tulips, while grown-up elves think creeping thyme makes a much better bed than Craftmatic does. Other fairy favorites include apple trees, moss, toadstools, elms, clover, blue flax, anemones, daisies, hazelnut trees, forget-me-nots, hawthorn, buttercups, marigolds, pansies, hollyhocks, lily-of-the-valley, Saint John's wort, wood sorrel, and rosemary. And I can't imagine any sprite worth its wings not wanting to sit under a mayapple umbrella on a rainy day.
A simple pool, perhaps just a birdbath, is attractive to "faeries" (the favored spelling among fairy fanciers), and it's said that during the daytime, pixies transform themselves into insects, butterflies, and birds, which are also happy to drink. Milkweed pods make excellent fairy boats. And just for laughs, fairies use Dierama pulcherrimum, fairy's fishing rod, to catch clown fish.
You can find these plants at pretty much any local nursery. But to locate dwarf trees, shrubs, and perennials, as well as miniature-gardening accessories, you may need to consult specialty bonsai, rock-garden, and garden-railway sources. Two online suppliers can be found at www.miniforest.com and www.westonnurseries.com/new_site_pages/miniatures.htm.
An Innovative Idea
Though fairy-gardening may not be everyone's cup of mead wine, it—or, more precisely, miniature gardening—has a number of advantages over its more conventional counterpart. For example, if you have limited yard space, mini landscaping allows you to create the diverse and dramatic displays of a larger garden, but with minimal expenditure of energy and muscle. It also allows you to showcase interesting small plants that might easily get lost in a garden of dinner-plate dahlias and humongous hibiscus.
A trough garden can be elevated to eye level with pedestals, making it easier to enjoy and maintain—a helpful feature if you're physically challenged. You can even shift your horticultural attention to the tabletop and create portable landscapes to be enjoyed year-round on your deck, balcony, or roof, or inside your home. See Tabletop Gardens: Creating 40 Intimate, Contained Gardens for the Home, No Matter What the Season, by Rosemary McCreary (Storey Books, 2002) for ideas.
A few words of warning, though: If you are a parent, you'll want to make certain no water feature is deep enough to endanger your child, or tempting enough that he or she might consider drowning your fairy friends in resentment for all the attention you're giving them. And if you own pets, you may want to take out disaster insurance for whenever Fido and Fluffy do Godzilla impressions down Main Street, Fairyville.
Also, be wary of using thorny plants like the delightful fairy rose, or plants such as foxglove, lily-of-the-valley, or monkshood, which are poisonous to everyone but elves; foxglove is also invasive in some areas. I'm reasonably sure fairies are not fond of carnivorous plants, so leave those out. Naturally, you must always use safe, organic pest-control products, if any, and above all, exercise caution when mowing, weeding, or dancing the gavotte in your garden, lest you do harm to the magical creatures living there.
Ilene Sternberg writes a biweekly gardening column for The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware.