How to create your own Miniature Garden

It was a fun project I and my husband did last winter. We created two miniature gardens and spent quality time with each other during this. In this post, I would like to share our experience/knowledge on creating miniature gardens.

Choosing a Theme

Its really important to think of the theme of the garden first and then build furniture/accessories/landscaping around that. 

For our 1st miniature garden, we planned to create multi-step landscaping with stairs joining each level; and a small patio at the ground level. We used Jade, Schefflera, Kalanchoe, Sedum plants in this garden.

For the 2nd one, we thought of a patio with wooden patio cover, some miniature chair/tables, a swing, a fence and birdhouses. This miniature garden housed Coleus, Schefflera and Kalanchoe plants.

Now mostly, choosing a theme and picking a container go hand-in-hand because you need to think of the accessories/landscaping which fits well in the container you pick.

Picking the right Container

We took simple pottery bird bath from a local vendor. She had a variety of containers with stands and with just a few bucks, offered to paint them in 3-layers of oil paints. After all the paint work, it looked really nice. You can also use any exterior wall paint instead. 

Any kind of small/big container would work fine here as long as it has drainage holes. For a container of around 1.5 feet diameter, 1-2 holes are sufficient; be sure to put them in the area where you plan to put the soil and not the concrete flooring.

Create a rough draft

Now that you have selected a theme and you have the container too, make a rough draft of how you would be placing the things in the container. Just take the measurement of the interiors of the container and draw it on a paper. Now make a dummy view on that - patio, plants, accessories or whatever you have thought of.

Start with the Patio

This is the first thing you would start creating (unless the patio is at some level above other landscaping items). For this you would need - some flat pebbles, miniature bricks, cement, concrete.

I would really like to thank the YouTube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSfI7uck9h8) for the great help to create the patio. It really explains so well. I searched a lot for those kind of flat pebbles but could not find in my area. The only ones I could find were round/irregular which we could not make use of. We instead experimented with some flat concrete stones with some cement color and that worked reasonably well. Also created miniature bricks by mixing white cement, different cement colors and water. My creative husband thought of this idea of using rectangular tablet strips as brick mould.

Wooden Accessories/Landscaping

We designed the garden for interior decoration so we chose wood. In case you want to put it outside, you can use more of stones.

To create all the wooden accessories you see in the pics, we have used just these four things - sleek decorative wooden sticks (or biddings), fevicol (or any glue for wood), a hand saw (to cut the wood pieces) and some wood varnish (which we used as polish + sealent once the garden was almost ready). You just need to wait for a few hours for fevicol to work.

For the multi-level landscaping, we had to place the wooden landscaping in the container before we add any soil. However, you can add the rest of the items later in the garden (like stairs, bird houses, huts, chairs etc.).

 Look at those stairs, aren't they cute; and the birdhouses; and that small swing. Enough of bragging :-). Now give your imagination wings and just create the accessories for your garden. 

Preparing the soil

As we know, fertilizing the soil in the small containers with a lot of landscaping can be tedious job so add some soil en-richer in the soil beforehand. Now, fill the container with the soil mix and get ready for the plantation.

For the convenience of fertilizing you can use appropriate liquid fertilizers later.

Plantation

We basically need to choose the plants keeping in mind the depth of the container, the amount of soil available to each individual plant, the root system and growth of the plants, and the amount of sunlight available. The plants should be slow grower so that they can stay in the container longer. Eventually if they outgrow the container you need to move them to some other container and add a new member to the garden.

While I was working on my miniature gardens, I did some research on what type of plants would work well in small containers. Here are a few: Various cactus and succulents (Jade, Kalanchoe, Peperomia, Adenium, Sedum etc.), Schefflera, Coleus, Purple Knight, Mondo grass, some varieties of Dracaena, bonsai Ficus, bonsai Yucca etc. If you plan to keep them outside you can try some small outdoor flowering plants too e.g., moss rose, calendula, small varieties of marigold, ice-plant, dianthus etc.

Take special care not to disturb the root system, so the plants do not get transplantation shock.

Now assemble everything in the garden (plants/accessories etc.) and Here You GO!!!

We even participated in the city's annual flower show competition in small container garden category; and bagged 2nd and 3rd prize (judges decided not to give 1st prize to anyone). That was a proud moment!!