As the itsy-bitsy scenes that line the display cabinets in her home might suggest, Darlene Chaplin loves to work in scale. She’s the president of Toledo Area Miniature Enthusiasts.
She’s also an avid gardener. So when she stumbled onto an outlet that combines the two, she was naturally drawn.
“It didn’t take much to get me hooked on these,” she said.
WATCH: Diane Giddens shows why fairy gardens have become a popular trend
These are fairy gardens, or, if you’re turned off by the whimsical winged critters that might or might not move into them, they might be gnome gardens or miniature gardens. They’re arrangements of scaled-down plants and scaled-down structures — houses, fences, patio furniture, you name it — that draw in fans with their convenience, creativity, and quirk.
“They’re a creative outlet,” said Diane Giddens, a longtime fairy gardener whose imaginative displays can be found at Oak Park Landscape and Water Garden Center in Swanton. She’s the owner there.
“I like to garden in my yard, but I only have one yard. And I can only do so much there,” she continued. “With a fairy garden, I can do a whole landscape in the course of an hour. I can have an oriental garden, which maybe I wouldn’t have at home. I can do all kinds of crazy things.”
The fairy garden trend has boomed since Ms. Giddens began dabbling in it 20 years ago. Suppliers of the tiny structures and accessories were scarce then, she recalled, so she would often DIY or repurpose bits from dollhouse or model railroad sets. It was also harder to come by the sort of dwarf plants that matched these structures in scale, so at least once she said rosemary became a stand-in for a pine tree.
Today hers and other garden centers and florists offer a wide range of tiny-leaved plants. These include both those that are naturally tiny, like baby’s tears, and those that are bred as tiny versions of bigger plants, like hostas, ivies, or even woody ficuses.
They also offer plenty in the way of garden-centric ornaments, ranging from the staples, like the structures where the fairies or gnomes live, to cutesy complements like vegetable gardens and fences lined with teeny-tiny rain boots.
“Anything you see in a garden center, you can probably find in miniature,” Ms. Giddens said.
Her fairy garden selection has expanded from one display to more than one room over the years. Kurt Smith, owner of the Flower Market in Monroe, where an annual Fairy Garden Festival draws 500 to 600 enthusiasts, spoke similarly of his shop’s wide-ranging selection.
“It’s endless,” he said.
Fairy gardens can be enjoyed off-season and year-round, either in containers, indoors or seasonally outdoors, or as a part of an outdoor landscape.
Ms. Chaplin of Toledo has both.
In the container gardens she keeps in her kitchen, there are whimsical houses — some store-bought, some home-made — paired with birdbaths, mailboxes, and, in at least one case, a stone-lined pond under whose clear plastic “water” you can just see an orange koi.
There are also succulents and greens, including the dainty purple flowers of a Mexican heather that passes as a tree in the scaled-down landscape. Colored gravel makes paths and faux waterways.
In her outdoor garden, Ms. Chaplin forgoes the containers and, to some extent, the concern about scale. Statuettes of tea-drinking fairies sit in a bed of green groundcover not far from other patches of garden where comparatively big gnomes keep watch.
Heather Herr, of Swanton, is another fairy garden enthusiast. She keeps hers primarily outdoors, arranging miniature landscapes in wheelbarrows, planters, and other containers.
Hers incorporate some store-bought and some home-made elements; fashioning DIY accessories out of twigs, stones, or bits of broken wind chime, for example, turned into a family activity when she and her then-teenage daughters got into fairy gardens six or seven years ago.
“They’re just fun,” she said. “I like them.”
While a fairy gardener might be advised to stick to plants that enjoy similar growing conditions — and, if placing a container outdoors, to avoid direct sunlight for concern of over-heating a presumably shallow container — there are really no rules when it comes to fairy gardening, Ms. Giddens said.
A creator can go for understated elegance, even forgoing the dollhouse kitsch for a more realistic-looking landscape, as she’s done in one display at the garden center.
Or they can go for full-on quirky. Her grandson’s been known to favor toy soldiers and Matchbox cars in the miniature gardens he’s made with her over the years.
He’s also the creative force at least one of the fairy gardens at the center: The container is an old tire, and it’s toy dinosaurs, not fairies, who seem to have taken residency there.
“There are no rules,” Ms. Giddens repeated with a laugh. “That’s the fun of it.”
Contact Nicki Gorny at ngorny@theblade.com or 419-724-6133.
First Published August 14, 2018, 6:39 p.m.
