At home with Jackie Flowers to welcome fairies to the garden!
Did you ever wish for a fairy garden? JACKIE FRENCH shares which flowers you might grow to create a home fit for a fairy queen
When I was six years old I was sure we had fairies in our garden. After all, Peter Pan said that all we had to do was clap our hands and call out “I believe in fairies!”
So I did, loudly enough that any fairy in the vicinity – or even as far away as Neverland – must have heard me and come fluttering, possibly landing in the mango tree in the backyard. The next day I even had proof that we had fairies – it had rained in the night, and all the spiders’ webs wore jewelled drops that Grandma said the fairies had left there. But Grandma couldn’t tell me how to keep the fairies in our garden.
Most children’s books available during my childhood came from England. They clearly showed that fairies were fond of English garden flowers. Fairies slept in the long tubes of foxgloves or lived in red and white spotted toadstools. They wore clothes made of rose petals and headdresses of clover flowers.
The roses were no problem – we had two bushes by the front gate, and plenty of clover in the lawn. Obviously our fairies need not be nude. But where would our fairies live?
We didn’t have any red and white spotted toadstools (fly agaric), though they can sometimes be found in parks near European trees. I might not be writing this if I’d carved toadstools into fairy bedrooms – fly agaric is poisonous unless transformed by fairy magic.
heavenly homes
Luckily my grandfather was an early advocate of growing native plants, though I didn’t tell him why I was interested in tube-shaped flowers. Grandpa was deeply rational and he might have cast doubt on the efficacy of clapping hands to bring the fairies.
But he showed me Christmas bells
(Blandfordia spp.), with their drooping bunches of rusty-coloured blooms, and correa, and wonga wonga vines
(Pandorea pandorana) covered with cream and mauve tube-shaped blooms each spring. I decided kangaroo paw
(Anigozanthos spp.) could also offer the discerning fairy a comfortable sleeping place. Best of all were the vast Sydney rock orchids (Dendrobium speciosum), which could cover half a cliff or an entire boulder. Problem solved! What fairy would want to live in a damp little toadstool when they could have a palace of rock orchids? They could even play football with our wattle flowers.
When I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my teens, I learnt that fairies also need the juice from heartsease (Viola tricolor) for their love spells. Drip a little juice into a sleeper’s eyes and they’ll fall in love with the first person they see. Luckily, heartsease grows readily in all but hot, humid Australian gardens. The native Australian violets Viola banksii and V. hederacea might work just as well. They make lovely groundcovers, with their bright green kidney-shaped leaves and white to purple flowers. They spread rapidly and are extremely tough. This is another way of saying that they can be very hard to get rid of, which may please the fairies, if not most gardeners.
These days, I’d be wary of fairy magic. It didn’t work out too well in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But this might just be the year to establish a grove of glorious rock orchids, so next time a child claps their hands and yells “I believe in fairies”, you can assure them your garden has everything a fairy might desire.