Several years ago, when beautiful granddaughters started to come into our lives, I made an impulse purchase on Etsy. I paid $75 for a “Fairy Garden Kit.” It included a large assortment of feathers, acorns, fairy twinkle lights, tiny colored pebbles, and little fairy garden benches made out sticks, twine and moss. Sometimes, I’d just get everything out and let the little girls sort through the colorful fabrics, the assortment of buttons, the tiny watering can and miniature mushrooms, just so we could dream about the day when they would be big enough to help me build a real fairy garden. One year, we waited until after the Christmas presents were all unwrapped and set up a temporary fairy village under the Christmas tree.
I have always wanted my own fairy garden.
Photo by Katherine Cavanaugh on Unsplash
The Fairy Garden Playdate
When granddaughter #3 turned seven this year, she requested a Fairy Garden Birthday Party. Finally, it seems I have a granddaughter who is just as enamored with miniature things as I am!
Unfortunately, this isn’t a story of how I finally got my own fairy garden. Instead, it’s a story of how fairies can conspire to create magic where it is most needed. And for us, that was some special one-on-one time with another magical gardener in our lives: Great-Grandma Joyce.
Great Grandma Joyce is an extraordinary gardener.
Sleepover at Great-Grandma’s House
After a beautiful evening visiting a local fairy paradise and searching for woodland fairies in a magical children’s fairy-themed escape room, we drove another hour south to get to Great-Grandma Joyce’s magical garden—one she’s been building for almost 40 years. This was an impulse decision, almost as if someone had sprinkled a little bit of pixie dust into my brain. Grandma agreed to the last-minute intrusion, and we arrived after dark for Great-Grandma hugs.
It wasn’t until this moment that I realized how much my granddaughters and my mother need a relationship with each other too. I hadn’t realized that none of them have ever wandered around and peeked into the fairytale bedrooms in her home, even though they’ve visited before. They haven’t poked around in her attic to see the abandoned dollhouse I played with when I was a child. They haven’t slept over in her sunroom with the stars overhead. Their childhood is fleeting, and as time marches on, so is their opportunity to spend time with Grandma Joyce.
Who better to build a fairy garden with than the grandma who taught ALL of us about flowers and snails and sunsets.
Slumber Party and Bedtime Stories
As the great-granddaughters fell asleep that night, wrapped up under her quilts, on the foam mattresses that her grandchildren used to drag out of the attic for cousin sleepovers, I had another pixie dust thought: They have never slept under her roof! What a gift that they can fall asleep here, with her close by, listening with us as we fall asleep to a reading of The Velveteen Rabbit. The story helped me remember why it’s important to cherish childhood. Grandma Joyce is our family’s version of the Old Skin horse. She’s the one with the wisdom who warns us that being loved enough to become “real” can hurt a little, but it’s worth it.
The following morning, as the sun rose, the granddaughters lay on the floor in the sunroom watching bluebirds flitting about in the trees overhead.
Then, Grandma Joyce, in her favorite fuzzy bathrobe, taught them how to make funnel cakes with strawberries, buttermilk syrup, and chocolate chips—the kind of breakfast fit for a fairy.
We worked for a little while at a table in the sunroom to handcraft some miniature dollhouse furniture from a kit, but the sunshine was calling to us, and so was Grandma Joyce.
Building The Fairy Garden
Grandma Joyce is 83 years old, but still knows how to dream, and how to think like a fairy. This spring, she’s converting a patch of her vegetable garden into a cutting garden so she can share flowers with her neighbors instead of just zucchini and tomatoes. She’s like a little miniature 4-foot-eleven fairy creating connections among her own neighbors by inviting them into the garden to pick flowers and feel the magic.
Each of the great-granddaughters chose from among the packets of seeds in the greenhouse, and Grandma Joyce helped them prepare the soil, pat their little flower seeds into place, and mark the site so they’ll remember who planted what when they come to visit again soon. They already have plans for a Garden Tea Party later this summer after their flowers bloom. They spent the rest of the morning searching for snails, gathering walnut shells to make more fairy garden furniture, and finding fragments of Robin’s eggs among the rosebushes.
We finished the day by gifting Grandma Joyce with the beginnings of her own fairy garden. It’s a small kit, but it came complete with a solar-powered fairy house, some colorful mushrooms, and glow-in-the-dark pebbles the color of Robin’s eggs. It seemed that the fairies will be happiest here where all of the memories live. Someday, maybe after Grandma Joyce is gone, I will build my own fairy garden. But for now, I’m content to ensure this one is thriving.
