First Attempt

Years ago, my great friend Carol introduced me to something I had never heard of before:

 

The Fairy Garden!

 

 

I was visiting her in Maine and we had an outing to the lovely Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. (Nice to be a member of the Chicago Botanic Gardens which allowed me free entry to this garden as well!)

 

We walked past the Pinecone Sculpture trail and along the Shoreland Trail and there, tucked away in the woods, were little fairy houses made completely from the findings

of the forest floor.  Who made these?  Folks wee and small and those with imaginations that never quite grew up...and I vowed that someday I would make a fairy house, too.

 

See?  Smack dab in the middle of this map?

This vow was made even before Grandchildren entered the picture.  And last week, it was time to gather up Miss E and Miss M, head out to the woods near our cabin in the North Woods and summon that imagination and create an inviting home for a Yooper Fairy!

Easy to find fairy fixin's in the woods:  birch bark, moss, twigs and rocks.

We decided to make a little camp for our fairies between two tree trunks...and of course we needed to make a path so these fairies could go back and forth for regular visits.

Miss M found her calling as a rock gatherer.

Here is my fairy house.  A little hole in the ground was carved out with a stick, and a flat-top rock was placed over that hole.  On top of the rock were bark pieces and five shells -

Miss E, the scavenger, raided them from our neighbor's sand supply (Sorry, Nordlunds and Anderson's).  Pine cones and moss were added as landscaping.



A couple of tiny purple and yellow flowers were added to the shrubbery.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood was expanding...



 

Miss E was creating her own world as well.  She stacked rocks on top of rocks

to create her tiny dwelling, then placed rotting forest bark as a roof on top of these rocks.

Because of its larger-than-mine size, I think this is going to be the pace for larger

groups to gather to socialize - more fluttering wing room!!

 



 

 

We ended up with a lot of extra birch bark and pine cones, so we did some

additional landscaping and added a "barking" lot - ha!



 

 

It's funny how these fairies work...both of us were just sure things were happening in this

little clearing that we made for our little winged sprites as we stepped away.

Like a rock that was white turning into a rounded gray stone....like a flower that was moved to a doorway from a moss bush...like a piece of bark shifting its position...like a pine cone

separating from its group.

 

Let us never forget the magic of childhood.  Or fairy power!