Make Fairy Garden Magic With Your Grandkids

Step 3: Check your DIY standby supply

You’ll want twine, waterproof markers and Popsicle sticks. White paper plates might also be a nice addition: They can become colorful fairy wings, tied on with twine, for kids to wear while they work.

Glue is a judgment call. The Quiet Waters Park festival submission rules discouraged its use in favor of all-natural elements. The white glue we all know from school days may be OK for an indoor garden, but it won’t hold up outdoors in the rain. There’s some tough stuff that can survive the outdoors, but you don’t want it to get on little hands. You wouldn’t want to use a hot glue gun around tots either.

You can find these kinds of supplies at crafts stores or even dollar stores, which is where Linda bought hers.

Fairies love flowers. Cameron Thompson helps her granduncle Ed Cooper surround her fairy garden with beautiful blooms. Esperanza (left) and Divino Lowe look on.

Stephen Voss

Step 4: Pick your plants

For outdoor gardens, Walsh suggests choosing colors and textures that “will let kids’ imaginations take root.”

If the garden is going to be more than a one-day-wonder, choose perennial plants that thrive in your climate (no tulips in Miami). For summer fun, you can pile in annuals like impatiens, which are happy in shade and sun. Legend has it that fairies like lacy maidenhair ferns for making crowns or rolling up the fronds to serve as pillows, according to Sandra Kynes, author of several books on botanical magic.

For indoor fairy houses, seek out tiny plants. “Most nurseries that are worth their salt tend to have a section with little, tiny plants that can be used for a terrarium. You’re looking for plants that start small and stay small,” like succulents and mini cactus varieties that don’t have sharp spikes, says Miller.

Melinda Franklin collects material in the woods for a fairy garden. Along for the fun and ready with a bucket to hold the bits and pieces of nature that will make the pixies’ homes is Ed Cooper.

Stephen Voss

Step 5: Get out and find some bits of nature

This can really add to the fairy garden adventure, paper-plate fairy wings and all! Head to the nearest park, woodland or seaside spot carrying bags or bins to forage for fallen flower petals or nutshells to be a fairy baby’s cradle, twigs to build tiny tables, pebbles for pathways, bark for house walls or welcome signs, and more.

Unleash kids’ imaginations with open questions. Hold up a find and ask, “What could this be?” says Strandlund.

On our Saturday afternoon meetup, Linda and Ed led the youngsters down a nearby wooded path for 30 minutes of gathering goodies.

When Linda asked her granddaughter Adele Nies, age 3, what she would do with two spiky little balls from a sweet gum tree, Adele proclaimed, “This one is the fairy’s pillow and that one is her blanket.” Her older brother, Asher, 6, insisted repeatedly that he was hunting for things he could use to “trap the fairies!” We finally asked him why. “I can take them to school for show-and-tell,” he said. His cousins, 17-year-old twins Divino and Esperanza Lowe, were charged with keeping the youngest ones away from any poison ivy.

Step 6: Raid your junk drawer for whimsical decor

Feel like your fairy house needs a bit more sparkle and shine? Your rag bag or a jewelry box where orphaned earrings live could hold the perfect garden additions. Anything twinkly works well as long as it is age appropriate for your grandkids. When I channeled my inner child to create a test garden before meeting with the crew, I found a little bird pin that I perched on the moss roof of a bark house.

Asa Nies adds pebbles to his fairy garden while his sister, Adele Nies, decides what bits of nature to include for her fairy home.

Stephen Voss

Step 7: Pile it on

There are no HOAs or zoning laws for fairy gardens. Let the kids install all the glittery doodads and mini critters they like.

Adele, Asher and 5-year-old Asa Nies packed their garden with a zoo’s worth of figurines of random sizes mixed in with a clutch of plastic fairies, while grandma glued the house together. Asher, a budding globalist, fretted: “All the animals are only from North America!” (I assured him it was OK to add a crocodile to the scene because crocs also live in the Amazon.) The twins and their cousins Cameron Thompson, 11, and her brother Ashton, 9, huddled with Ed to redecorate the fairy house and garden they had first made for the Quiet Waters Park festival.

Truth be told, you can pile up some leaves with an opening, call it a fairy hotel and commence making up stories on the spot, according to all the experts I consulted. Sarah Levinthal, youth educator at the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden, reminds adults, “It may not look like what you had in mind, but kids don’t care. They’re into imperfection.”

Adele Nies decides what should go in her fairy garden with her grandmother Melinda and granduncle Ed.

Stephen Voss

Step 8: Make and cherish memories

There’s something about being in the presence of magic and imagination that brings out the artist in all of us.

While following the crew around, I was reminded of my now-adult daughter’s dancing years. Back home, I was inspired to craft a Sugar Plum Fairy out of a Popsicle stick with pink-markered toe shoes, layers of white parchment paper for a tutu and tinfoil wings. I imagined she might twirl in The Nutcracker’s Land of Sweets with a forest of lollipops and candy canes.

My Saturday afternoon with the fairy-gardening family wrapped up with us chilling out over cookies and cold drinks and choosing our fairy names.

Cameron dubbed Ed “Fairy Uncle Giggles” for his rolling laughter and imagined she would be a magical soccer star modeled on her favorite player, Alex Morgan. Linda, surveying the happy crowd on the Nies’ porch and lawn, concluded, “I’ll be ‘Grandma Fairy Joy’ so everywhere I go I can bring joy to people.”