Excerpts

Introduction There is no other pastime as diverse, adaptable, and accessible as gardening in miniature. It is a collection of a number of other hobbies merged into a single incredibly creative one. And it appears that we've taken the best and easiest aspects of these leisure pursuits and left the hardest parts of them behind. We don't break our backs gardening and landscaping: we use spoons for shovels, forks for rakes, and we find ways to grow slow and small. We play with plants and with the garden. We casually build small hills and dales in our gardens; we eortlessly carve riverbeds and move property boundaries on a whim. We dream of different ways to plant and repurpose tiny plots morning, noon, and night. We begin a fresh garden design from scratch with every new pot we pick up, or every garden bed we till, something full-size gardeners simply cannot do. We can appreciate all kinds of miniature and dwarf plants and include leggy shrubs and broken trees in our work because we will use them as authentic additions to our miniature garden scenes. We adore tiny conifers with their little buds and needles not as collectors, but because they are genuine landscape trees in miniature. We don't practice the art of bonsai, but we will gladly use its ancient techniques for pruning and looking at plants in a new way. We use the same bonsai-tree starts but instead of cropping off the roots to fit them into shallow trays, we lovingly place them, uncut root ball and all, into our miniature gardens as delicious anchor trees and hang tiny swings or birdhouses from them. Instead of spending hours indoors renovating a dollhouse, we take our miniatures outside and put them in the soil. We can complete a garden from start to nish in a couple of hours; that's a feat seldom heard of in the dollhouse world. We don't craft just anything and everything either; our projects have to rev up our imaginations, fill our hearts, fit into our tiny gardens, and be special enough to warrant giving up such valuable real estate. We are versatile crafters as long as it has something to do with the miniature garden. We dabble in masonry, mosaics, woodworking, painting, and all kinds of applied arts. We love to use our hands and minds to build and make rather than just buy an idea to plunk down in a pot of soil. We relish the realistic details, knowing that that is where the magic and enchantment is made. We can't join an established club because we would be guilty of being so selective. If a miniature gardener were looking for a club to join, which would it be? A dollhouse- miniature club would quickly scale down any idea made with living plants, real soil, and water. A rock garden club would toss us out for aggregating with trees and miniatures. A conifer or a regular garden club would consider us weeds because we would only attend when the topic resonates in miniature. A bonsai group would prune us away for sneaking in miniature patios and furniture under their specimens. Railroad garden groups would put us on the next train out because we would only want to talk about the plants and the garden. So, here is another book for you, my fellow miniature gardener: you are welcome in this club anytime. This book is a follow-up to my first book, Gardening in Miniature: Create Your Own Tiny Living World . Grow, play, experiment, plant, create, invent, dig in deeper, or garden smaller anytime. But do think big and dream bigger. My goal for this book is to oer unique projects that are doable by anyone, independent of their skill level, are practical in application, and will delight the novice and experienced miniature gardener alike. In other words, you don't need that specic chair in the project to do the project; interpret the projects for your own ideas. Have fun, make mistakes, and create. This book begins with advice for setting up the ideal workshop for a miniature gardener and an overview of the basic materials and tools needed for most projects. Then we move on to the projects, which range from nationally themed projects capturing the spirit of Great Britain, Spain, Japan, and India to projects inspired by special occasions, from the Fourth of July and Halloween to birthdays and weddings. Storybook ideas follow: a fairy house, an intriguing door to the world of gnomes, a shack on a deserted island, aliens from outer space, and a world beneath the sea. And last, we look at Wardian cases and broken-pot gardening, and sneak attacks (okay, with permission) in the form of guerrilla gardening. With all the projects in this book, let your imagination fly. Reinvent or adapt the ideas to use with other themes. Take the techniques gathered here and use them with abandon. Each project is photographed in a miniature garden to show you how the nished piece looks in a garden and to give you an idea of how you might apply it to your own gardens. I hope you'll enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed getting my ideas out of my head and onto these pages. Excerpted from The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop: Fill Your Tiny Living World with 35 DIY Projects from Adirondack Chairs to Zombies by Janit Calvo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.