Yesterday on Pinterest, this offering of a Fairy Garden:
(#1)
This is a container garden, with real plants. But tiny real plants, mini-plants, or you might say, fairy plants. Using the snowclonelet composite fairy X ‘small or delicate X’.
From my 11/24/14 posting “fairy X”, with a subsection:
Resembling fairies. Resembling in various ways. For instance, by being small or delicate, as in:
fairy penguin, fairy shrimp, fairy cake, fairy cycle
That would take in miniature gardens like the one in #1, and presumably also little forests of miniaturized woody plants (bonsai forests).
A different sort of fairy garden is merely a miniature garden-like composition with fairy-tale objects in it, especially including figures of fairies. Consider, for example, this play garden from Big lots:
(#2)
There are no actual plants in this fairy garden, though there are fairies. Tending play gardens. And there are gnomes. And fairy-tale houses. Plus a magic mushroom.
There are, of coyrse, intermediate cases, which I find especially entertaining. One issue of Country Living offered this wash tub garden as a DIY project in a “fairy garden ideas” feature:
(#3)
The plants are real (but tiny), but there are also fanciful fairyland props, like the super-mini couch and the mushroom house. I already have some of the plants, in my cactus/succulent dish gardens — except that these have now grown large, in several senses of large. The dish gardens need to be divided, and the plants mostly need to be treated as full-scale vegetation. (Well, there’s one aloe that does seem to be a miniature cultivar, but everything else has grown in size and is inclined to sprawl.)
(Oh yes, I suppose the dish gardens are fairy gardens in another sense, in that they’re gardens maintained by a fairy.)
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