Festive for Fall: Fairy Garden Seasonal Makeovers

In September I shared my farmers market fall fairy garden. This week I finished transforming the rest of my fairy gardens for fall.  Fall fairy gardening is especially fun because there’s no planting required!   I get to focus on decorating, my favorite part.  You can pull out any dead growth caused by summer heat spells or early fall chill, and fill in those areas with figures. Likewise you can trim back and pull out overgrown plants to make room for your decorations. My main problem is overgrowth, so the layout of my fall gardens is determined by the choice bare spots left after I remove my spring and summer decorations, and utilizing the shorter grassy areas filled with low growth plants an inch or less in height.  Often the smaller accents I added in the spring will become buried under plants and roots and I have to dig around for them when I am removing my summer figures.  Sometimes I don’t uncover them until the following spring when I redo my gardens!  A forgotten ceramic mushroom here, a tiny squirrel there… it’s like a treasure hunt.

Here are four fairy gardens I have outside at home this fall in addition to the farmers market:

Campfire Critters

This fairy garden was a quick and easy design (and dare I say adorable!) because I used a set of camping critters my mom gave me.  We’ve got one hedgie with an armful of S’mores fixins and another roasting marshmallows for S’mores.  Mr. Fox is proud of his tent setup skills and the squirrel just seems enthused about nature in general.  Maybe he’s ready to go on a hike?

The campfire critters are on my porch and used to be a fairy garden tea party.

Fall Merriment

My favorite part of this fairy garden is the raccoon popping out of the pile of leaves and the scarecrow who is too friendly to scare away any crows. For this garden I first trimmed the shrubby Mexican heather back a bit, but left the blue star creeper in front because it forms such a dense mat.

Pumpkin Patch

This is my favorite of my fall fairy gardens.  I had this idea to make a gnome garden pumpkin patch this summer when I bought the pumpkin patch stand on the left, which I found at Michael’s.  I’ve used the pumpkin house in other fall fairy gardens the past two years, and thought it worked perfectly here.  The gnome I found at JoAnn’s.  Then I added various pumpkins I already had.

Autumn Gnomes

This mini garden is just a hodgepodge of all my fall fairy garden stuff I had left over.  As you can see, the chocolate chip ajuga in the center just took over this container during the summer, so I plopped the scarecrow right in the center.

I hope it’s a long time before we get our first frost here in central Indiana, as I want to enjoy these fairy gardens as long as possible.  I really miss them during the winter and early spring months!   So far it’s been a beautiful fall, although we could really use some rain!  It’s super dry and all my perennials are crispy.  How is your garden doing?  Do you have any fairy gardens?  Leave a comment below!