Children’s crafts: how to make a miniature garden

Do you remember making these as a child? It’s a little world in miniature – made from things gathered from your garden or a park.

You will need:

• A big tray – ones with high sides from garden centres are ideal, although a kitchen one works fine.
• Some cardboard, glue, scissors, sellotape and paints – and any other crafty bits you fancy
• Blue-tak, or modelling clay
• A sponge
• Lots of things gathered from your garden – stones, grass, petals, twigs, branches, moss etc

1. First decide what kind of little world you want to create. We went for a pony paddock, complete with stable. We started by creating a simple little cardboard building by cutting a door in a box, sticking on a simple roof with tape and painting it. A little sponge did a good job at making brick and roof-tile patterns. Doing this on a hot day is lovely as everything dries really quickly!

2. Arrange your little model on the tray – be it a stable, house, cave – whatever. Start adding some larger details to your scene. We went for large pebbles, painted blue to look like little ponds. You could also create a pond with a mirror, or a circle covered in tin foil.

3. Start gathering your bits of grass, leaves, petals and twigs. Get creative – we started with some bits of conifer to look like little trees. Blue tac is invaluable here for sticking them down and keeping them reasonably upright. Grass clippings work particularly well too.

And there you have it – an adorable little garden to keep them amused for the rest of the day! It’s a great way to get their imagination flowing. You don’t even have to do the messy painted part – just stick to natural things from the garden and see what you can create.

Later on I went out and bought Tom some wood shavings for his stable. The game then developed into this…

I think you can see how much fun he had!

If you fancy some other ideas for a miniature world, how about a dinosaur world with a volcano? Or perhaps a replica of an ancient Welsh burial chamber…?