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Make Fairy Garden Magic With Your Grandkids
A step-by-step guide on how to attract fairies to your garden — and make beautiful memories with your grandchildren
A fairy, colored by Adele Nies, visits the fairy garden Adele created in Cheverly, Maryland.
STEPHEN VOSS
Feel a slight whoosh of air? Hear a faint twinkling sound? The fairies may have arrived in your garden! They certainly can when grandparents and grandkids bring their imaginations to life while building a fairy garden together.
What is a fairy garden? It’s a miniature garden designed to draw in fairies, elves and gnomes, and a perfect grandparent activity with kids ages 3 to 12. The best part: You can make one quickly if you only have a bit of time (or a little one with a short attention span), or it can be an ongoing project with fairy play for days.
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“It’s a great family bonding experience,” says Ed Cooper, 69. He rounded up his sister, Melinda (Linda) Franklin, 65, and her grandchildren, as well as her nieces and nephews, to build a garden for the Fairy House Festival in May at Quiet Waters Park in Annapolis, Maryland, where Ed is a volunteer.
They had so much fun that Ed, Linda and Linda’s daughter, Nicole Nies, agreed to do it again with seven youngsters in June and let me tag along.
Here are eight tips I learned from them and from experts on how to bring fairy garden magic to your next grandparent-grandkid activity.
Melinda Franklin and her granddaughter Adele hunt for the best fairy garden decor nature can provide. A leaf is never just a leaf in a fairy garden. It can be a floor or a roof or a place to collect water for fairies to drink.
Stephen Voss
Step 1: Pick the perfect fairy home place
Scope out a spot in your yard or on your grandchild’s home turf — perhaps a small clearing amid ferns, hostas or shrubs (to hide the fairies, of course). Just don’t park the party near ornamentals that can be poisonous to tots, such as foxglove or oleander.
For the June fairy fun, the gang gathered at the Nies’ Cheverly, Maryland, home. They chose to build the fairy village under their magnolia tree, surrounded by orange, yellow, blue and purple flowers grown by Nicole. Just in case they wanted more color, Ed arrived with a tray of nasturtiums.
No yard? No problem. Fairies will happily come to a fairy house in a sunny spot in an apartment or on a balcony.
Cameron’s garden is ready for fairies — a dreamland come true.
Stephen Voss
Step 2: Every house, even a fairy house, needs a foundation
For outdoor fairy gardens, the usual scene includes a house, which could be as simple as a lean-to made of bark and moss; a pebble path; and some decor, such as a bench made of twigs laced together with twine or a fairy pool made by parking a shell atop a wine cork, says Kristin Strandlund, who heads a Minneapolis preschool and posts fairy-gardening crafting advice on social media.
My Saturday fairy gardeners designed a bark-and-leaf house with a little path of pebbles that were quickly crowded with animal and fairy figurines.
For transportable or indoor fairy gardens in a glass bowl terrarium or dish garden, you’ll need a bottom layer of pebbles. Top that with a thin layer of activated charcoal to purify the water (check the pet store aquarium section). Then put in potting soil, nestle in plants, add moss for mulch and add decorations, says Mark Miller, the education and exhibits director at the Pittsburgh Botanic Garden, where kids ages 4 to 7 build terrariums at a fairy camp every summer.
Fairies do prefab too. If you want something more ready-made, crafts retailers stock unfinished mini houses, fairy figurines and dollhouse-sized furnishings. Melissa Mills, senior vice president of merchandising for Michael’s, says they offer a $25 Fairy Garden Kit to meet growing demand. And Etsy abounds with ready-made kits.
But the most fun is seeing what kids come up with on their own, says Liza Gardner Walsh, author of the Fairy Garden Handbook. She once gave a fairy house workshop where “the kids didn’t want to build a house — they wanted to make a soup kitchen for the fairies that needed one because they didn’t have enough food.”
Cameron adds a little glue to help a mushroom in her fairy garden stay upright. She created a house from leaves and twigs. Her granduncle Ed Cooper helps out.
Stephen Voss
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.
Cameron Thompson adds a beautiful swan to attract fairies to her garden. Also in her garden: a bird’s nest, rocks and a fairy to watch over it all.
STEPHEN VOSS
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.
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.”
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