Mosaic Monday : Fairy House

I received encouraging comments on the recent photo of my little fairy house, which has survived 3 years now in the garden, with incredible durability, since I built and installed it there in May 2008. So I have assembled a mosaic of photos over the years (click the mosaic for a slightly larger view).

I wish I could have found the photo from three winters ago, when it was completely covered in a mound of snow. See this post, which shows it just prior to being buried.

Pop over to Little Red House for more of this week's Monday Mosaics.

"Down on Your Knees" Photo Contest Entry

Gardening Gone Wild is having a Photo Contest with the theme "Down on Your Knees".

This is my entry. It is from an enchanted boggy place I discovered in October while hiking with my husband "in the bush" somewhere on the Sunshine Coast of BC. I was delighted by these brightly coloured mushrooms (click photo for a larger view):

I would have been even more delighted if I had spotted the fairies playing hide-and-seek there just moments earlier (click for closeup)...

...but after all, there is no such thing as fairies, right?

For more details on the Photo Contest, which closes August 22, click here. Happy snapping and good luck!

Spring is Finally Starting to Spring

I think Spring has finally Sprung. Or at least that's what my allergies are telling me. ;-) Actually, this year, due to the unusually cold winter, my allergies have only started about a week ago. Most years I am already suffering in February, and it goes until April. So hopefully it will be a shorter allergy season for me.

Today I went looking for some signs of Spring. Like this lone crocus (the only one not eaten by the squirrels I guess) poking through the decaying Gunnera leaf (as always, click the photo for a slightly larger image):

This past winter hit so cold and so suddenly, that I didn't fold the Gunnera leaves back over the crown to protect it. So hopefully the snow insulated and protected it. We'll find out.

I love this mini daffodils, they are a cheery sign of Spring (the tiny red sprouts nearby are from the Geranium "Victor Reiter" (cranesbill):

This time of year, my metal frogs are visible behind the bare twisted vines of the climbing hydrangea. Wow, those little guys have held up to a number of years of weather now, and look as delightful as when I bought them many years ago, in a little shop in Gastown, Vancouver, BC. If I ever see them again (they had lizards to choose from also), I will buy some more.

The fairy house held up surprisingly well to the winter, it appear to be undamaged from the load of the snow and pelting of the rain this winter. So I must have done something right when I built it (click "fairies" on the left for postings on the construction of the fairy house, and clearing and planting of the fairy garden).

Although not particularly attractive to me, the flowers of the Petasites Frigidus has emerged. It will be followed by very attractive leaves. For more photos of this handsome plant, click "petasites frigidus" at the left, or click here (note also those same frogs in the climbing hydrangea).

Some of the fruit trees are visibly budding. Particularly the cherry trees, such as this Lapin (dark) cherry:

...and the Rainier (golden) cherry:

This is the time of year for major garden cleanup, and fortunately the past couple of weekends have cooperated with good weather. I have pulled and cut many bags and wheelbarrows full of last year's stalks and rotting leaves, to make way for the new plant growth. I keep thinking I'll take some "before and after" photos, but forget to take the "before" ones, or move too randomly from place to place, and can't decide what I'm going to tackle first. So here's one of my "after" photos, after I cleared a lot of tall grass and weeds around the base of some of my missouri currant (Ribes odoratum) bushes (the clumps of dead-looking grass to the left will soon be an attractive green and white striped ribbon grass).

This part of my "hummingbird garden", with the Buddleia davidii (butterfly bush), Crocosmia, and red Monarda (growing all around the white stick), is substantially clearer, but still needs more cleanup. I have a nasty grass which has grown and tangled itself between the crocosmia shoots (that hairy mess in front of the buddleia), so one day I need to dig up the entire clump, sort it all out, and replant the crocosmia. I have a feeling it may not be this year. We'll see.

All the best for Spring to everyone! Go out and enjoy the garden whenever you can.

Enough Snow Already!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas, and are finding some time to relax and enjoy visiting with family (or playing with new toys - like our Wii system)!

This is more snow than I can ever remember in Vancouver (BC), and certainly in December! We must have had about 3 feet of it already, and it still keeps coming! Even the garbage trucks didn't venture down our street earlier this week, so it will be 2 1/2 weeks between pick ups this time, instead of the usual 1 week!

This summer I built a fairy house for my daughter, and have made a good start on a fairy garden around it:



When I was preparing the garden for winter (which I never quite finished, but got pretty close), I decided to leave the fairy house out, and get a photo of it with snow on the roof. Well, it didn't take long this winter to get my wish:


But then it kept snowing:

Today when I looked out, the fairy house is completely buried, only a white bump in the white landscape. I had a thought to run out there and rescue it, but then again, the snow is a few feet deep, so I'll instead wait and see if it will bear the load. Let's hope when it turns to rain, it starts gently, not a downpour.

But as the song says, since there's no place to go... Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow!

Fairy Hide-and-Seek Image

I believe this is my best 3D image yet. I call it "Fairy Hide-and-Seek". It took a couple of hours to figure out the depth of field to match the focus of my mushroom photo, but I think the effort paid off. What do you think? (click the image for a larger view)

Fairy Discovery at Whytecliffe Park

The other day, we were exploring the scenic seaside Whytecliffe Park in West Vancouver with some friends, and I noticed it was unusually quiet. I wandered back along the trail, and was surprised to see my daughter and her friend Justine chatting with fairies. I was able to take this photo before they noticed me and flew off (click the image for a larger view):

Garden Related Glimpses : mid-Aug 2008

Here goes with some more garden photos, and other miscellaneous photos from August. Instead of my usual close-ups, here are a few wider views of my garden:

Here is our fairy house, with blooming lilies towering above it:

Here is my hummingbird corner, with a lush butterfly bush cascading over a clump of crocosmia, and a set of red monarda falling to the right:

Here is one of challenges I regularly deal with, blackberry vines reaching over the fence into my garden (those nasty things seem to grow one foot or more per day!). The large purple plant on the right is a purple sage. To the left of it, the straggly flower stalks of Stachys byzantina (Lamb's ear). I don't much like the look of the flowers, but I leave them for the bees (especially the little mason bees) which are all over them. To the far left, our red currant bush, which bore more than a 4L (1 gallon) bucket of berries this year:

I was very pleased to gather a large harvest of lavender flowers from my neighbour, before her landscaper removed the large plants this year. While I had the lavender drying on a number of cookie sheets and other trays on the kitchen island, the fragrance throughout the house was amazing:

I also made a batch of lavender jelly. I was very pleased with the natural colour of it (yes, just lavender, certo & white sugar, no other additives or preservatives). Oh, and did I mention that it tasted good, too? My 9 year old daughter has been asking for it on toast for breakfast ever since.

While I'm posting photos, here is one of Alouette Lake, BC, from above. My husband and I discovered this viewpoint while off-roading a few weeks ago:

Yesterday (Sunday) we took the kids canoeing from Barnet Beach across and up into Indian Arm, to escape the heat. It was indeed much cooler there, and ended up being a beautiful day to canoe, with only the occasional drops of rain. We spotted this harbour seal with her pup on the shore, mainly because a pair of kayakers ahead of us had already stopped to watch. Otherwise we may have missed them on the rocks, since they were quite well camoflauged:

Here is a closeup from the same photo, you can better see the mother seal with her pup (he was not interested in looking at us, so that is his back end, you can see the flipper on the right side):

Aiko in the Forest

Tonight I was much too tired to work, so I found myself downloading more accessories for Aiko. It has been a long time since I played with DAZStudio. Made sense at the time, except now I'm tired and my eyes hurt, too. ;-)

Okay, here goes, Aiko as a fairy in her new "Tink" dress, with a texture applied (which happened to fit okay, even though designed for an entirely different outfit), and her new wreath headband, courtesy of faerie-dreams.com (click the image for a larger view):

What do you think? Was it worth staying up until midnight, or should I have caught an early night while I had the chance?

Fairy Garden

I guess it was last year that a offered my daughter her own "fairy garden", but then other than her adding a small stump there and the occasional sticks and such, the plants were not particularly unique to a fairy garden. Just more of my usual, such as crocosmia and Japanese anemone. So I finally decided something had to be done, especially since I have had this fairy house on the counter for too long. So today I started clearing out the crocosmia and such:

Hmmm, I think that hosta has to go also...

...to make room for the fairy house. And then I have started planting miniature plants, such as the tiny hosta in the bottom left corner, and sedums and sempervivums, and a small violet, and whatever else I will find around the garden which will fit the scale of the fairy garden:

I will leave the lilies (they look like huge trees behind the house), and the Hibiscus syriacus (Rose of Sharon) behind, but will eventually clear out more, so that all the "gardens" surrounding the house will be more to scale. If I didn't know better, I would even leave the horsetail which pokes up in spots, to form tiny trees. But the horsetail is much too successful already to give it such encouragement.

Fairy Discovery

Last weekend while we were walking Lighthouse Park (one of my favourite parks), my daughter discovered a fairy (click for a larger image):

Fairy House - Part 3

I managed to find the time to put a roof on the fairy house, but then haven't squeezed any time these past couple of weeks to post photos of it, so even though it's midnight, I'm finally going to make time to post.


The grass roof is the faded straw from my blue oat grass, which I quite regularly pull handfuls from, to keep them looking fresh and greenish-blue. The decorative puff-balls are stems I dried from my bunny tail grass (Lagurus ovatus) at the end of last summer. I can't wait until I get the fairy house out into the garden. I'll be sure to post photos then, but I have a feeling it may be a few more weeks before I do that.

Fairy House - Part 2

I put in some more time on the fairy house project today, while watching a movie with the kids. Now the 4 walls are done, and a bit of the roof. I'm still thinking that if I get a shell of a roof together, then we should be able to collect enough grasses to cover it. That will look pretty cool, like a tropical hut. Here it is tonight:

Fairy House - Part 1

My daughter has been asking me to help her build a fairy house for a while now. I have resisted, feeling that I don't have the time or know-how to make anything worth cluttering the garden with. But today, while taking advantage of the absolutely gorgeous weather to clean up the garden, she noticed the butterfly bush (Buddleia Davidii) twigs I was tossing in the wheelbarrow, and asked for them, to make a fairy house.

Suddenly, I realized that this was our answer. The twigs from the butterfly bush are quite woody, and very plentiful. My bush was probably close to 10' tall & 8' wide, and I was cutting it back to about 6', so there were lots of twigs available.

We started by tying the branches with string, but I knew that wire was the real answer, so we made a quick run to Rona before it closed at 6PM, and picked up a reel of gauge 24 galvanized steel. This turned out to be the best lineal price of their various wire options (even better than the black steel wire), easy to bend (the gauge 20 would have been too much of a fight, and likely would have broken the twigs while tightening), but still quite strong, that I should hold up outdoors for quite a while.

Anyhow, here is the house (just the outline) after maybe an hour of work, just before the kids went to bed:
After that, I kept working for a couple more hours, and filled in two of the walls, one with a window:
The house will have a front door, two side windows, and solid back wall. Even though I've thinned my blue oat grasses a couple of times (now I wish I hadn't sent a large bag of it to the city compost last week), I think we can get enough grasses to even cover the roof.

Part of me is screaming that I really don't have time for this project. But the other part of me (which I'm glad I'm listening to this time) is calmly saying that if I don't have the time now, then when will I? After all, at 9 years old, and with 2 fairy birthday parties, dozens of fairy books, fairy toys, and a half dozen fairy movies behind her, how long will my daughter continue her interest in fairies? So if it isn't this summer, then when?

By the way, I had a perverse gardening thought... Since the buddleia branches were just clipped today, and knowing how reliably these grow from cuttings, if I pushed the house in the soil in the next couple days, there would be a good chance that some of the branches would take root. That would be a sight to behold, wouldn't it?

I've left the mess of branches and clippers and wire on the kitchen table, so we can hopefully continue again tomorrow evening. We'll eat at the island for now, if we have to, to keep our momentum on the project.

Pink Green Forest Fairies

I found this photo, I believe it was of a mountain azalea. Anyhow, it looked like a lovely spot for some flower fairies. First, a pink and a green one (click photo for larger image):

I think this looks even better, their dresses match the pink and green colours of the foliage:

Weird cakes and weird creatures

We are coming to the end of birthday season. My kids have birthdays 3 weeks apart, so for a period of about 4 weeks, it is birthday season.

My daughter had a fairy birthday with her friends, where they decorated fairy wings and wands, and gave themselves fairy names. Since she also had a fairy birthday last year, and the Fairytopia cake, we didn't want to choose the same cake, so I Photoshopped an image for her, and had it put on the cake. Save-On-Foods offers this service, using sugar paper to add the image to the cake. The result is pretty neat.

Here is the photo I altered (the original was lifted from the site fantasy-fairies.com), to insert my daughter's face:


I'll post the photo of the resulting cake once we develop it - I took it on the SLR camera.

On the weekend, we had the combined birthday party with the family, and a combined cake, too. Encouraged by my Photoshop experiment, I decided to try out my DAZ 3D skills, and create my own image, which I did, and then I Photoshopped the kids' faces onto it. Here is the image, which I entitled "Mythical Meeting in the Forest":


I'll try to post the resulting cake also, once the photo is ready.

Every week, DAZ seems to come out with another free item. Fortunately last week it was the dragon, just in time for the birthday cake. This week it is a weird looking creature called "Xerr". I think he's a little too scary for a birthday cake!:

5 Beautiful Fairies

Okay, I've learned a bit more.... How to duplicate objects, change colours... Now I've ended up with a set of 5 beautiful fairies (click for larger image):

Dragonfly Fairy

Oh my, this one is gorgeous, and I love dragonflies. I think her pose/posture is not quite there yet, but I love it already... What do you think? How would you improve this image (click for a larger view):

Trio of Forest Fairies

It didn't take long tonight (less than an hour) to create a magical scene of a trio of beautiful fairies in the forest. Something to the right has captured their attention, and stopped them mid-flight (click the photo for a larger image).

What was that light? They had never seen one quite like it before....

Well Dressed Fairies

I got tired of the fairies being stuck in wet suits, and decided to buy them some dresses. What do you think (click photo for a larger image)?

Fairies and Toadstools

It was just over a year ago I was pleased to discover and take photos of some beautiful spotted red mushrooms (the classic toadstools from the childrens fairy tales - see mushroom photos post), and thought this may make a good setting for my fairies. What do you think? (Click the image for a larger view.)


Here it is, in a puzzle: