Janit Calvo - The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop: Handmade Accessories for Your Tiny Living World

Janit Calvo

with photographs by Kate Baldwin

TIMBER PRESS
Portland, Oregon

For my Mom and Dad, who planted the
seeds of art, craft, gardening, and miniatures

Mention of trademark, proprietary product, or vendor does not constitute a guarantee or warranty of the product by the publisher or authors and does not imply its approval to the exclusion of other products or vendors.

Copyright 2017 by Janit Calvo. All rights reserved.
Photography credits appear on page 241.

Published in 2017 by Timber Press, Inc.
The Haseltine Building
133 S.W. Second Avenue, Suite 450
Portland, Oregon 97204-3527
timberpress.com

Text and cover design by Laken Wright

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Calvo, Janit, author.

Title: The gardening in miniature prop shop: handmade accessories for your tiny living world / Janit Calvo; with photographs by Kate Baldwin.

Description: Portland, Oregon: Timber Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016045507 (print) | LCCN 2017005197 (ebook) | ISBN 9781604698091 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Gardens, Miniature. | Garden ornaments and furniture. | Garden structures.

Classification: LCC SB433.5 .C37125 2017 (print) | LCC SB433.5 (ebook) | DDC 635.9--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016045507

A catalog record for this book is also available from the British Library.

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 weve taken the best and easiest aspects of these leisure pursuits and left the hardest parts of them behind.

We dont 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 effortlessly 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 dont 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 finish in a couple of hours; thats a feat seldom heard of in the dollhouse world. We dont 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 cant 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 offer 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 dont need that specific 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 finished piece looks in a garden and to give you an idea of how you might apply it to your own gardens. I hope youll enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed getting my ideas out of my head and onto these pages.

Miniature gardeners garden as little as possible.

A workshop of ones own: a spot to create in can be inspirational in itself.

The ideal workshop for the serious miniature gardener would consist of three separate workspaces. The first would be an outdoor area for storing plants and containers, planting, and getting dirty. This area would have a potting bench to work on and shelves to keep the plants and gardens off the ground, which makes it easy to water and care for them.