Can someone educate me on what miniature gardening is. Are those real plants?

RizzoR said: Can someone educate me on what miniature gardening is. Are those real plants?

Yes most if not all posts on this forum are real plants!

Miniature garden can mean a few things:
1) Small recreations to scale of things. Usually famous buildings. Or garden settings, just really small! Small plants that look like big plants, like mosses and other plants can be used.
2) Garden with small plants. Just small plants in a garden!
And a buncha other versions of this type of gardening.

There are also some great pics and instructions here for miniature gardens.

https://garden.org/ideas/view/...

Yes they are real plants in here! The miniature gardening can take the forms of dish gardens, fairy gardens, miniature landscape settings with decorations, terrariums, vivariums, or just plain miniature plantings, or and using just very small or slow growing small plants!

It's quite a fun activity and a challenge to create planting and displays that simulate later plantings just shrunk down!

There is no authority which defines mini gardening, so you can do it in any way you want. Some of it is done outside, some inside, some looks like shrunken reality, some is pure fantasy. Some have fairies, but a mini garden doesn't have to be a "fairy garden." Personally, I say that I have a combo pot if there are no objects in it. The objects convert it to a mini garden, for me, but that's just a personal thing.

Suitable plants can come from any climate, from the deepest shade to full sun, leafy, cactus, or succulent, and be of any basic structural type (herbaceous, vine, shrub, tree). Mini gardens can be seasonal, or relatively permanent and changing with the seasons just like a full-scale garden.

Whether or not a particular plant would survive in a particular location or mini garden atmosphere, and for how long, would be up to the individual garden & gardener.

People build containers, structures, use a wild assortment of plants in countless different scenes, and some even have working trains or other activity. Longevity is not a requirement for all mini gardens, all mini gardeners. In exactly the same way that a full scale garden requires periodic maintenance, so do my mini gardens. I believe that most mini gardeners enjoy "gardening" their mini gardens. If I become unable to do ground-gardening at some point, I should still be able to trim, guide, move & propagate mini garden plants, I feel confident the weeds won't get out of hand. ; )

Does anyone plant their mini garden in the ground rather than in a dish? I have a new piece of ground that I am clearing of weeds etc. and there are lots of rocks already there from a rock garden of sorts. I probably will grow other plants such as daylilies outside of the minigarden. I am getting excited thinking about this!

I do! It's pretty much the same in care , just scaled up!! Why not have a fairy country compared to a fairy village!

Sharon, that's a wonderful idea! That is definitely a thing. People do dwarf shrubs, fairy doors at the base of a tree, a water feature, whatever is of interest. Your mini garden doesn't have to be similar to anyone else's, or you could like someone else's so much that you try to copy it. One of mine has a car junkyard in it, which was sort of a stolen idea from a mini that I saw where the whole thing was a micro junkyard.

I have an area where I propagate and keep a few mini plants but I get just enough fallen leaves that it's difficult to do much with the smallest plants "out in the wild."