Miniature Garden in a Wicker Basket
This is the second season that I’ve had a miniature garden planted in a basket and displayed in my yard. The garden sits on a small table between two big wood and metal chairs that are favourites of mine. The chairs are tucked under our children’s old monkey bars that now support vines in the summertime, and we’ve placed bricks under the chairs to make it a rather cozy setting in the yard. The mini garden is movable, so when I need to use the table for refreshments, the garden simply gets moved out of the way, displayed elsewhere in the yard for a short time.
It’s been rather fun to try out small plants, and to see what works for me. Because I work full time and travel on business, I am not always home to water my plants. Other times I simply forget to do so. This year, the plants in my miniature garden held up well to this typical neglect, getting watered by natural rainfall much of the time, and, in fact, this seemed to be sufficient, as the whole scene looks somewhat overgrown.
New this year in terms of garden items gracing my beginner’s miniature garden is the pale purple birdhouse, a product from China distributed by Georgetown Home and Garden in Kent, WA. Also new is the “Mini Stump Bird Bath with Cardinals,” item 4380, from Top Collection. I picked up both of these at the Oakridge Garden Centre west of Steinbach (‘Stony Brook’), Manitoba.
I can give you the names of two of the three plants used this year in the miniature garden. One is Saxifraga x arendsii, ‘Rockfoil,’ which gets little red flowers (I never saw them), and the other is Crassula muscosa ‘Princess Pine’ – described as displaying “thin stems of tightly overlapping, narrow, light green leaves.” I had hoped to transplant the plants from the mini garden into a patch of soil in my outdoor garden to overwinter. The Princess Pine tag, however, advises me to “protect from freezing,” so I will have to come up with Plan B, since I am not particularly good at keeping indoor plants alive. I will likely tuck it in the outdoor soil under a pile of leaves somewhere, and inspect it in the spring to see if it lived. If not, and probably not, I’ll try something new and hardier next year.
Maybe one day I will have an indoor mini garden, but that is a future project. For now, the garden mini toys and basket, soil and all, get tucked into the garage to overwinter. This is the north, after all. We can’t be forever babying things here.
Photography and Text: Copyright Nadine Kampen/cookiebuxton
Location: Home garden
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