Our grandchildren want to make a fairy garden in our front yard. They saw the one down the street which is full of tiny plastic geegaws on astroturf. I’d like to help them do this, but without introducing more plastic into the environment. Can you recommend any resources?
My first suggestion is to invite them on a collecting adventure—in the garden itself, or further afield. They can collect fallen twigs and bark, loose moss, acorns or horsechestnuts (I have fond memories of furnishing a doll’s house with chairs made out of these, with pins for legs and ladderbacks woven with multicolored yarn), interesting seed pods (how about oculus/bull’s eye windows made from translucent Lunaria seed pods?), stones and beachglass—whatever captures their imagination.
There are quite a few books in our Parent/Teacher Resource Collection that have garden craft projects for children, including making dwellings for woodland fairies and trolls (Woodland Adventure Handbook by Adam Dove, 2015), making fairies from flowers and creating houses for them out of twigs, moss, stones and other natural materials (The Book of Gardening Projects for Kids by Whitney Cohen and John Fisher, 2012), making elves, hedgehogs, and tree spirits from clay (Forest School Adventure by Naomi Walmsley and Dan Westall, 2018), and more.
Pacific Northwest author Janit Calvo’s two books (Gardening in Miniature, and The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop) are aimed at adult readers and include some (but not exclusively) natural materials. Both are worth looking at for ideas that incorporate big-garden design principles scaled down to tiny size. Depending on how much you want to invest in the fairy garden, Calvo also has an extensive plant list. You could even learn bonsai techniques—but that is not really a child-focused approach. It might be best to allow the fairy garden to be as ephemeral and gossamer as its mysterious inhabitants. There are always fascinating materials in nature that may be used to rebuild and remodel the fairy garden as it changes over time.
An aside: if your grandchildren would enjoy a foul-weather indoor fairy garden, they might want to help you design a terrarium. There are quite a few good books on this topic, including Terrarium Craft by Amy Bryant Aiello and Katie Bryant (2011), Plant Craft by Caitlin Atkinson (2016), and The New Terrarium by Tovah Martin (2009).