Flurry’s Garden: A Memorial Tribute in Miniature for a Very Special Cat

My first fairy garden design of the year might well turn out to be my favorite. I am obsessed with this little pink and white fairy garden celebrating my sweet angel kitty named Flurry whom I was privileged to spend my life with for 18 years. She passed away a year ago in April and I miss her so much. But I have found some cheerful ways to celebrate her life, such as with this fairy garden and a cat planter my mom gave me for my birthday last year, shown below planted last summer with pink and purple flowers and this spring with white pansies.

Flurry is buried in the Forever Friends pet section of Oaklawn Memorial Gardens, and I often visit her gravesite to bring flowers or little mementos, or just talk to her. Flurry was a beautiful, sweet-tempered cat I adopted as a kitten from a shelter when she was just eight weeks old. Her pink paws, nose and ears looked so pretty with her white fur and her favorite color was pink, so I kept the color scheme of this garden mostly pink and white, from the accessories to the flowers. I was amazed to find a cat figure who looked just like her, even down to her facial expression.

When selecting flowers for this fairy garden, I chose dainty pink and white blooms: Irish moss (the field of green with tiny white flowers in the front), pink alyssum (behind the Irish moss), white lobelia (planted next to Flurry), carpet tulips (far left corner near the pink mushrooms), sea thrift (spiky plant in the back left corner with the tall pink ball of flowers), and rose dianthus (planted behind the white fence with little pink roses). I ordered the carpet tulips from Miniature Gardening and the Irish moss from Two Green Thumbs. This is the first year ordering fairy garden plants by mail to use in several of my containers and it was a great experience! I highly recommend both of these small businesses as they took such care to pack the plants, and the transit time was short via Priority Mail. The plants look a little droopy when you first unpack them, but they bounce back very quickly with sunshine, water, and fresh air. The rest of the plants are from local nursery L&M Gardens. I’ve been wary to go shopping during quarantine, so I’ve limited my trips to places I can buy plants outdoors without having to go inside stores.

For my fairy gardens this year, I planned the layouts before actually planting anything. Usually I just picture in my mind where the accessories and plants will go and dive in, and then plants sometimes end up in places where I wish I had left space for accessories or I end up with bare spots, so I just kind of improvise and fit everything in as best I can. This year’s strategy was to make sure the container I was using would be the right size for everything I wanted to include, and then I filled it close to the top with soil, and tested an arrangement of the plants and accessories on top of the soil. Even with this strategy, none of my gardens ended up exactly how I mocked them up. You can see in this photo that I changed the placement of the plants and path, but the mock-up gave me a good basis to start from and the spacing ended up working out well. You’ll notice I didn’t end up using the rose with hamster in it because the scale was off and I felt like it detracted from Flurry and the rest of the scene. (I had a favorite hamster named Muzzy a long time ago – another departed pet – so it wasn’t a completely random idea to include him.) I decided to plant this garden along the diagonal using the square container as a diamond shape, because things fit better that way and it allowed me to section off the back corner with the fences and have them fit across the width of the container.

The accessories I used in this garden are a mix of new items bought specifically for it from My Fairy Gardens (the pink and white mushrooms, white fences with rose bushes, Flurry cat, and pink birdhouse on a stake) and items I’ve used in past fairy gardens (the benches, paths, flamingos, flower pot, pink flower stepping stone, and large pink tulip that used to be red and faded to a rosy pink in the sun). The watering can and birdhouse are dollhouse miniatures of my mom’s from the early 1980s. I enjoy repurposing miniatures I’ve used before and then sprinkling in new items to make a completely new garden theme. I love the way this came together. Flurry looks cozy in her backyard oasis waiting for birds to visit, surrounded by pretty flowers and lots of girly pink princess things!

There’s something so inviting and charming about this garden that makes me want to step inside it and be reunited with Flurry. I’ve enjoyed gazing at it and reminiscing about our life together. I’m so glad I planted it first and have it to enjoy as long as possible this summer! I just finished two other little fairy gardens I can’t wait to share with you soon. And I have plans to complete a fourth this weekend, along with a pretty ambitious list of yard work to do. The weather forecast looks so favorable for a weekend spent outdoors! How nice it will be to wrap up May with a burst of garden productivity. Stay tuned for more fairy garden posts coming soon!