Capturing Winter in a Miniature Garden

I don’t know about you, but I love decorating for different holidays especially during the wintertime. There are plenty of playful fairies and gnomes who also adore and appreciate this time to celebrate. When I am dressing up the miniature gardens for my favorite season of the year, I usually look for garden accessories that apply to all the winter months. Sometimes this can mean going ALL OUT with boxes of decorations, lots of details, and long hours of work. Other times it can be simple accent pieces added to existing decorations to show my holiday spirit without drowning in nutcrackers, bows, and figurines.

When I start updating my fairy gardens for this time of year, I want to change the theme toward winter, and enhance the scene with a few decorations for each individual holiday that can be easy to remove and swap out. This only truly applies when I am updating an existing garden instead of creating a new one. I have been guilty of making entire fairy gardens just for Halloween and Christmas – my two favorite holidays. If I begin a new miniature garden, I always start with a festive container that can match the theme I am trying to honor. However, sometimes I prefer just updating what I have already created for upcoming parties I will be hosting.

At the onset of winterizing my miniature gardens, I start with removing anything linked to another season. You want to remove decorations that hold fall colors like miniature plants, garden accessories with leaves and rakes, along with harvest looking materials. Essentially, you start with a ‘blank slate’. I like swapping out my rustic looking wooden fences for a smoother white picket option that fits in more with the winter theme. Of course, snow comes to mind when I think of winter in Wisconsin and putting some ‘snowflakes’ in the fairy garden is a fun possibility. A creative way to add the illusion of snow is to take smooth small stones from a lake, paint them red, green, and white, and then embellish the stones by using a paint pen to draw silver snowflakes on top. I like to scatter the stones throughout my fairy garden to transform the miniscape into a winter wonderland. Another understated addition that adds the dimension of snow, is placing glittering, white snowflake picks into the soil. The snowflakes give texture and height to the design. To add the element of softness, I place faux cotton snow on the roofs of fairy houses throughout the miniature garden. I found some of these ideas while searching the Internet for posts on planning a miniature garden.

When I started looking through a favorite website, I ended up stumbling upon many unique winter garden accessories. A few examples would be snowmen, shovels, and sleds. Another really cute alternative would be a frozen pond along with a couple pairs of ice skates laying nearby. I grew up in a place that truly captures the beauty of winter and because of this, I want to pack all of my favorite winter activities into my miniature garden. I have to check myself, because I would like to add an ice fishing house, a snowmobile, and some skis. However, when you are working with a small space less is more. You want to make sure that you are enhancing your garden not cluttering it. In the past, I have added too many miniature accessories into my fairy gardens and they always turn out unreadable. No matter what, you want the scene to be clear and understandable, especially when capturing winter in a miniature garden.

Miniature Gardening' offers miniature trees, accessories, fairies, furniture to create enchanting miniature landscapes for containers or your yard. Miniature trees from 'Miniature Gardening' are an exclusive collection of plants for miniature gardens or fairy gardens. To learn more about miniature garden ideas, visit us at Miniature-gardening.com.