Craft: How to make a fairy garden

In October, I decided we were going to make a fairy garden and use one of the pumpkins that we'd purchased from the Slindon Pumpkin Festival as their house, with a view to changing this at Christmas and then again in the spring.


I have found the best way to make our garden look 'authentic' is to have your child decorate it, as I wanted everything 'just so' and Max was far more happy to place the accessories here there and everywhere, oh and these are random accessories at that - such as a skull, homemade hedgehog and twigs.  Just how fairies would decorate I believe!

The first step is to find a suitable container, and we have the perfect upcycled chest of drawers...

Once the garden is ready for planting we picked up small shrubs from the garden centre, my aim is to move these out as they get too big and plant them in the garden over time.  The idea is these shrubs look like trees, and the garden is situated on the outskirts of the forest.

We placed the shrubs around the edge of the planter to give the forest effect with our pumpkins in the middle.  As you can see we also decorated these with a few twigs for doors and a cardboard cut out for a window.  The pathway leading to the house is made from normal play sand that we have recently put away for winter.

Next up - Mushrooms.  This was the fun part, I asked my son to pick out 'jewels' that he thought would make good mushrooms so we need long round ones and flat tops, he put his jewels in a pile and I used my glue gun to stick them together once he was asleep, some steps are just for grown ups.

Before we can plant the mushrooms we need some grass, now obviously we didn't plant real grass - I don't like cutting the grass in my garden, let alone maintain a second one ;-)  We used moss and I was quite surprised just how much of it I had scattered around the garden (not sure if that's a good thing or not)!!

With the grass in place, it just needs the finishing touches of the mushrooms that we made earlier to be placed on the land, we also found various button shapes such as snails and watering cans from Max's craft box.  This is the part I feel is perfect for your children to do as they really will decorate in the style a fairy would.  At least, that's how I image it to be, unless, like me, there are some neat freak fairies around....

We had so much fun with this, I can't wait to give the garden a makeover in the spring as I've been buying the odd little pieces from eBay such as lampost, benches, signposts.  For more inspiration on Fairy Gardens please visit Marvellous Mrs P.