more faerie gardens
Some ideas for adding magic to random small corners of your outdoor world. Many things you thought of as "indoor only" live perfectly well outside in Nature. Repaint, recycle. Use some imagination.
Picturesque Faerie Tale Cottage Entrance
(sort of...)
with water garden and mermaids
Yeah , you know all those people with pretty lotus lined pools in their gardens... the ones the bue herons come and pluck goldfish out of... oh, excuse me, koi... (fancy carp to the rest of us).
Welp, you don't need to spend a fortune, dig a hole or buy a filter.
All you need is:
Welp, you don't need to spend a fortune, dig a hole or buy a filter.
All you need is:
- a container: this can be a large pot (lotus grow perfectly well in pots if you feed them pond fertilizer), a rubber horse tub (safe for fish, tadpoles and other things that might find your pool), or a kiddie pool (not necessarily safe for fish, they jump out and sometimes the plastic is toxic).
- dirt: this can be a couple bags of play sand (like $3/50 lbs at the hardware store), gravel or stone mulch, river rocks commandeered from the last kayaking trip (why is your boat sitting so low in the water????), or a pond plant potting soil or mix with sand in a pond plant pot (stupid cheap at the plant store, like $3)
- plants: SAV, EAV. I found wild lotus seeds, you can buy them, or other plants at your local nursery. I got arrowroot (an emergent aquatic vegetation) at a library yard sale for about $3... everything here seems to be $3. I got mystery "oxygenators" (submerged aquatic vegetation) which looks suspiciously like the invasive pondweed choking our local lake, at the nursery stupid cheap. They sink and oxygenate the water, nice if you're raising tadpoles or fish. Water hyacinth should be guarded with ninja cows in the south, because if it gets loose there, it chokes waterways. Here in the north it just fills your pool and produces pretty flowers in late summer. Hyacinth floats, likes to be crowded (in fact, won't bloom unless it is). You'll need to feed your hyacinths and lotus, unless you have pooping fish... but they like to eat hyacinth. Arrowroot and lotus require pots to be rooted in. You can bring the pots in over winter. Water hyacinths are hard to overwinter, (bring in, keep under light), but you can give it a try. They're cheap and easy to buy again in the spring.
- tadpoles: a pond with easy access to frogs and toads will collect eggs, then tadpoles. With enough algae and SAV they can eat, grow and leave when they're froglings. I saved a few gazillion from a mudpuddle in the pasture.
November Faeries
In summer, the faeries wear flowing tule. When fall weather turns cold, I find old socks, $1 knit gloves that now have holes in some of the fingers and turn them into faerie sweaters. Glove finger ends become hats. A bit of tule finishes it off. Tule holds up very well in months of random weather, though some of the colors might fade.
Buring the Midnight Oil and Recycling Faeries
A few years ago my Ace Hardware store had some faeries in the bargain bin.
For like... $1.
Actually really nice faeries. Well sculpted, cute, playful, but not gushy awful cutsey wootsey bouncy wouncy.
You should know my idea of Faerie is JRR Tolkien and the Elves of Middle Earth.
It was a long time till I accepted that those little wingie things could be kind of fun in your garden and co-exist with other mythologies.
So the dollar faeries came to live in the garden for years, winter and summer. In winter I'd wrap them in sweater remnants, in summer in tule, as you can see in the slideshow above.
They persevered and faded to alabaster.
I have many more pressing Art Projects of Importance to do.
I am recovering from a nasty case of Crohn's and feel still like a limp dishrag. I have No Energy for Pressing Projects.
So there I am at midnight painting freaking faeries.
And one hid in the damn avocados I grew in a pot and my friend should come and get them and take them to Florida and plant them in her yard before they turn into trees...
So I painted her this morning when I should have been doing Important Stuff. She came out kind of virulently tropical... like nice hot beach somewhere on the equator with bright colors.
The faeries came in a sort of pale white blond. I decided faeries are diverse as Nature herself so...
...wait, is that skin tone actually purple? Blame it on the midnight oil lighting...
...this is the kind of goofy project where you can turn off your fancy artsy fartsy brain and just play with paint and faeries and cows and unicorns and moss and crap...
The brick faerie house has a story.
On the Chesapeake Bay beaches, we pick up round rocks, the odd shell, sea glass, and bits of brick worn down by wind and tide and wave and sand.
I had enough to cover a Nature's Nectar (Aldi's juices) bottle, one of my favorite bottles for its "lunette window" feature. A bit of lumpy sea glass (a piece of a bowl?) made a neat additional window, glued on top of the bottle, with Modpodge sand mortar and brick bits around it. You paint the bottle with ModPodge, apply a good half inch or more of ModPodge sand (not runny, not crumbly), press in rocks, let dry a day, do another side. A wet plastic spoon and wet brush help smooth and apply the sand.
The brick stash contained a number of heart shaped pieces. I find a lot of heart shapes in rocks, shells and bricks collected from the beaches.
I was working on this the day we had to put my old dog down. My cousin and her two boys came to assist (which largely meant grooming the other dog and playing with her for hours!). I had found several hearts in the pile of brick to put over the driftwood door of the faerie house. I had no idea what to do for a doorknob.
Rus, 9, picks up another heart and says "this could be your doorknob"...
brilliant...
So this is Leggy's house of hearts. (the one with the big red starfish).
The pale green dry sink is a vintage piece. That is its natural layered painted worn distressed look. It has never been refinished in any way... you can't fake that!
There is nothing quite as nice for faerie gardens as a toob of frogs... Safari and some other outfits make cool things like that.
Sculpey and ModPodge are the basis of all crafts. Sculpey stays soft till baked (275, 15 minutes for every 1/4 inch of thickness). Bad ceramics and plastic toys can become sand sculptures: ModPodge, then dump sand on... repeat a couple times.
There is nothing quite as nice for faerie gardens as a toob of frogs... Safari and some other outfits make cool things like that.
Sculpey and ModPodge are the basis of all crafts. Sculpey stays soft till baked (275, 15 minutes for every 1/4 inch of thickness). Bad ceramics and plastic toys can become sand sculptures: ModPodge, then dump sand on... repeat a couple times.
Formerly Boring Corner, Crates and Chairs
An old wooden crate, then a recycled wooden chair added interest to a plain white wall. This corner garden by the door changed over the years and seasons. Several Ace Hardware Store garden faeries, stupid cheap, looked nicer than their price tag would suggest. I added tule or bits of old sweaters or fake fur for "clothing", made hats of the ends of cheap knitted gloves. Million bells or wave petunias looked fine till midsummer when they kind of fizzled.
Random Outdoor Corners
faerie festival at Spoutwood Farm
Ideas for enchanting your garden, yard or farm... or porch. Click on the mermaids to go to sea, er, see...