My Fairy House, Pollinator Garden, and a Medium’s message ...
July 24, 2024
It all started with a dream to create a beautiful flower garden dedicated to the types of flowers that would attract bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds for pollination, as well as bring a sense of joy and inner peace into my little backyard that is surrounded by houses in our development. There are many mature trees in our new neighborhood which I love and appreciate, but I miss the woods that surrounded my previous house, the larger piece of property our house was on which created more space and privacy from our neighbor’s homes, and the local wildlife that visited daily, which included deer, turkeys, foxes, opossums, owls, raccoons, snakes, and wood ducks, to name a few. My present backyard is much smaller than my previous one and mostly shaded during the day by my neighbors tall Pine and Oak trees so growing veggies like I did in my previous backyard is out, which is why I decided to learn more about flower gardening since many flowers can thrive in partial sun and total shade. There are two spots in my backyard that are sunny for several hours. In one of those spots I have a raised garden bed dedicated to growing herbs, and the other, my new pollinator garden. There are also a lot of bunnies in my present neighborhood so finding the types of flowers that they do no like to munch on has been a challenge but at the present time I seem to be winning this battle. I’ve been working very hard to bring my dream to fruition and planting lots of different types of flowers, that will bloom at different times with the idea that the backyard gardens will always be exploding with color and different flowers. It makes me really happy to already see a lot activity in the gardens everyday between the bees, butterflies, and even hummingbirds!
Another interest of mine is all the folklore and whimsical tales about Fairies and I had been contemplating building a Fairy house that I thought my young granddaughters would be excited to see in the garden. They both love gardening with me. We hunt for slugs in the mornings when they are here visiting and remove them from the garden and place them in the far corner of our yard, away from the flowers, together. We also plant seeds and water the plants together. I began sketching ideas for my garden and Fairy house in a little book, last winter. I got busy breaking ground for the new garden this past Spring. The Fairy house was still on my mind but hadn’t started to build it yet.
On April 6th, I went to my friend’s Yoga studio, with another friend of mine, to an “Open Reading event” with a local Medium, Chris. There were 12 or 14 guests at this event including me, and one by one he would look at each of us when he felt a message come through from “Spirit” and give us a message. Well, Chris blew me away when it was my turn! First he told me that he felt a grandmother energy around me and told me she said she is always with me and loves the Lilies in my backyard. I knew right away he was talking about my Nana, as she and I were very close, and my backyard is full of Lily of Valley flowers that the previous owner planted and Lily of the Valley was one of her favorite flowers. When we were looking for a house in 2022, the housing market was crazy and we lost several bids on other homes for various reasons, but when I saw these flowers in the backyard of this home, I told my husband it was a sign that this was our new house! And we got it, with Nana’s help, I’m sure! But what really blew my mind was the next thing Chris said was that your Nana wants you to make a Fairy Garden! There were several other messages too that night, but the fact that he picked up on the Fairy Garden I had been thinking about and no one else new about yet, and the Lilies was enough for me to get busy building my Fairy House! I started on this project right away, sketching the way I wanted it to look, taking walks in the woods to gather bark that had fallen off the trees to use as roof shingles, pinecones, sticks, dried seed pods, etc., to use for decoration. I enlisted my husband to build the roof frame for me that would sit on a tree trunk I found in a neighbor’s yard from a tree he had taken down. My husband did a great job creating the roof for me. It was perfect and couldn’t wait to begin decorating it.The search for the right trunk took a couple of weeks. I would search our neighborhood whenever I heard someone taking down a tree to see if there was a tree trunk I would be able to use for my project and I eventually found the perfect one.
Overall, this was such a fun project to do! I spent many hours in my garage, in my creative flow, catching up on podcasts and music, while crafting my Fairy House. I felt Nana’s presence with me too! I painted the roof with house paint to help preserve the wood. I covered the roof with bark I found from all different types of trees. I filled in any holes and crevices with moss to give it a more whimsical woodsy vibe. I crafted and painted a little birdhouse for the front of the home, from a piece of scrap wood, and used pinecone shingles for its roof. I next got the idea to add a balcony which I made out of another piece of fallen wood I found in a local forest and built its fence out of sticks I found as well. I built a chimney out of cement and river rocks. I used vines off of plants in my yard to decorate the roof too and I know this will keep evolving over time as well as my gardens. I did purchase two, beautifully crafted, little Fairy doors and windows from two different artists on Etsy.
It’s only been outside for a week in my garden and has already brought a lot of joy to my granddaughters, family, and friends, when they see it. It makes me happy too, every time I walk into the backyard, and see it in my garden and I know my Nana loves it, too!