Sometimes creating original content can be challenging.  I think the trick is to just hammer away with some basic idea which you can then go back over and enrich, liven up, and tease out the true message you had intended.  This is the intent of this article, to be a simple guide which you can use to aid your own creative process and bring fairies to life.

To create an interesting fairy garden the first thing you'll need is an interesting vessel, something antique, flashy, or unique.  Here I chose an old wooden drawer that we had painted white.  Because this container is untreated wood I lined the interior with a sheet of black plastic.  If your garden is going outside you'll also need some sort of drainage in the bottom, mine, however, is being displayed inside the Artknapp store.

After carefully filling the container with soil—or some other substrate—you can cut the plastic down to the soil line, however, I waited until I was finished the entire garden and even then I just tucked the excess down the sides.  If you use a moist soil like I had you may also want to wait until you've finished forming your hills and dips.


I actually used left-over Christmas greens—cedar, pine, holly—but Fairies enjoy dirt, flowers, twigs, springs, and all things natural, which is by definition abundant and majestic and makes decorating your garden that much easier for you. 

I had a few pieces of slate stone in my yard.  I brought them in and broke them into smaller 'pavers', they worked perfect to highlight the pathway into the fairies house.  The pathway divides the scene approximately along the golden mean—about 5:8—which is an aesthetically pleasing effect you should consider emulating.  In the left section of the scene I pressed the soil down and placed a pool surrounded by stone benches.  Standing water is a great 'in-between place' that a fairy might use to enter this realm, or return to their own at night's end.

Small stones, rocks, and moss all add to the garden on the cheap but ArtKnapp has a great selection of fairy houses, fairies, paths/walkways, furniture, gnomes, and coloured mosses and stone.

There is a lot of lore on fairies but one thing we know for certain about them is how they are created; James Matthew Barrie, through the mouth of Peter Pan , said this about them, "When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl." 

Fairies than are the result of a child's laughter, and so it is with that I hope this article helps you bring a little joy to a child you Love.