A Broken Pot Fairy Garden

Jennifer gifted me a beautiful fairy house that she made at a ceramics studio nearby. I’ve decided to incorporate it in a broken pot garden! I’ve never either of these before, a broken pot garden or a fairy garden, so it should be interesting to see how this goes!

(Click on the pictures for much larger images)

I started by buying the pots and the potting soil mix I plan on using for this project. While at the store for those specific items we also saw a neat looking cactus that we thought would be nice and decided to pick it up as well.

I did buy two pots, figuring I would mess this whole thing up. I don’t think it is necessary to have 2 pots available, but it did give me extra material to use to be a bit more creative. If the broken pot you have is already broken or if you think you’ll do a good job the first time in trying to break the pot, then I think you’d be okay buying one large pot and one small pot, using the small part for the extra accents throughout the project.

Breaking the Pot

Your best bet seems to look around the gardening center and see if you can find any pots that have already been broken. Perhaps you can convince them to let you have the pot or pots for free, saving you money. If not you’re up for a challenge and have to make some choices.

I started by doing what I had seen in other videos. I literally took a hammer to the pot. It was a disaster. It shattered every which way and even a chunk of the bottom came off of the pot. I was left with a lot of pieces to use, but no way to arrange them in a broken pot garden.

So I did what any reasonable man would do. I took out the power tools and cheated.

I used a Dremel tool to score the pot where I wanted it to break. More than that, really, as about 80% of my cuts went through the pot. With few spaces left I decided to gently tap the pot and it graciously split right where I had already scored the pot. Since I didn’t have more pots to practice on I’m not sure just how little scoring you can get away with, but scoring the pot first certainly did help.

Arranging the Display

With a wedge taken out of the pot I began to consider how I would arrange my pieces. I went with a traditional stair-case approach, as you can see in the pictures. Some of the dividing pieces of clay pot that you can see are very long, some are stubby. That didn’t seem to matter, they all worked just fine.

This part of the process is very instinctive – just add a bit of potting mix to the bottom and start arranging the pieces as you go.

The large section I cut out of the pot was place at an angle and still provides the major structure to hold up the majority of the soil. Wedge it in just behind the wall of what is left of the pot. Then as you fill in the stair area it will be held into place.

However, I think you’ll also note that once you have this placed somewhere you’ll feel very wary about moving it, so be cautious. It is pretty, but it doesn’t give you the confidence that it really wants to stay together.

Planting the Garden

With the general setup in place I went around our property and collected up a bunch of different plants. I took a few things into consideration: I looked for plants that were growing in full sun and that weren’t in super-wet places. I expect I can keep my garden moist and I know it will be in full sun, so I wanted to pick the plants that were most likely to adapt to their new home.

I also looked for plants that were different shades of green, had different textures, and grew at different heights. There needs to be variety in this garden, after all!

I then started placing these plants wherever it felt right. I placed low growing mosses, grasses and creeping plants on the stairs and on a path up to the door of the fairy house. I placed tall flowering plants towards the back of the house. I placed a larger creeping plant where it might drape over the front of the pot when it grows some more. I added in pea gravel for accent and as a bed for the cactus, to ensure its roots didn’t stay too wet.

Move-in Ready

And there you have it, a fully finished broken-pot fairy garden! I’m really pleased with out it all turned out. Now we’ll just sit back and wait to see if the plants take root. If not, we can always swap some of the plants out for others.

Whether or not a fairy decides to move it we’ll likely never know. All we can do is offer a place to stay and rest their wings. Hopefully our new garden will be a nice little respite from the rest of the forest for our magical friends.

Be sure to Subscribe to our YouTube Channel as we’ll likely show you this again later as the year goes on.

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