Garden Features For A Miniature Garden
Garden features like paths, pools, pavilions and watercourses need to be planned with clear measurement of how they fit the dimensions of your miniature garden. It could be helpful to plan using a map which is the actual size.
Planning where the features will go
The first step in actually making a trough garden is to flat pieces of concrete or brick to the bottom of the trough. These can act as firm foundations for the pool and for each structure. Paths and watercourses need foundations at intervals to support them. After all the garden features have been anchored to the bottom put in bits of hardcore for drainage, then compost above this. This is so the garden features will not move around if the soil subsides a bit. Thus you need to decide their position in advance. After the compost layer has been added, miniature trees can be planted. Last of all, miniature flowers are added.
DIY or Ready-Made?
For a miniature Islamic-style garden, there’s a case for first seeing what you can make yourselves, rather than buying items made for miniature railway landscapes, dolls’ house gardens, or Japanese Bonsai gardens. You risk losing your garden’s character if it contains things which obviously belong elsewhere. Also, if you make it yourselves, you can keep everything to the same scale.
Consider what could be done with materials like the following:
- Exterior quality plywood can come in very thin, workable sheets. It could be used for pavilions. It could be cut into mini-planks and notched for mini-star pattern trellis screens. (It would need weather proofing after being cut to shape.) Balsa wood, which is so easy to cut, is another option, though protective weather coating seems advisable.
- Milliput is a remarkable material which is prized by makers of detailed models. It might be useful for anything from model fountains to edgings for geometric mini-pools and flowerbeds. Take a look at http://www.milliput.co.uk/ and other Milliput websites.
- Thin sheet copper can be easily cut, bent and shaped to contain flowing water on mini-watercourses. Using a large nail and a ruler, sheet copper can be impressed with Islamic geometric designs. It goes a pleasant green with weathering – on the internet are recipes for speeding this up. Copper could be used for a mini-chadar waterfall – or for decorated panels of garden pavilions. (Sharp edges of cut copper need filing or folding over.)
- Modelling clay can be used to make elaborate, attractive buildings. But there is the drawback of getting it fired in a kiln.
- Plaster of Paris and plasterboard is easily carved (may need a protective weather coating.)
- Plastic pots, covered in stone-like hypertufa, can act as mini-pools.
- Watercourses might be made from hypertufa reinforced with wire mesh – with a strip of pool liner under the surface, since hypertufa lets water through. Maybe even with jade coloured tiling on top.
- Pools and watercourses could be cast in sand and cement, using Gelflex moulds, provided they are reasonably thick.
- There might be uses for mosaic techniques and varnished decoupage of decorations, as mentioned elsewhere.
There are many other possibilities – what are your own ideas?
Flowing water
You can make Watercourses to flow through a miniature garden, using an ordinary re-circulating electric pump (either mains or solar power). It could have a tube attached to its outflow pipe, leading to the water’s entrance point into the garden, in the standard way that pumps are used for garden waterfalls and artificial streams. Fine tuning would be needed to avoid flooding the miniature garden. You could include Chahar Bagh watercourses. You can have little waterfalls and could make a miniature chadar out of material like copper or Milliput.
Miniature fountains
Mini-fountains are also possible. A problem with many electric pumps is that, in ordinary fountain mode, they would produce too large a fountain for the scale of your garden. Instead you could try this:
- Make a tank or pool from a covered plastic box, raised perhaps 15–30cm higher than the rest of your mini-garden.
- Fit several plastic tubes (5mm internal diameter – not smaller) into holes at the bottom of your tank.
- Attach a tiny homemade nozzle to the other end of each tube.
- Put a long tube on the pump’s outflow pipe
- Lead this to your tank.
Water flows down each tube, which is buried underground and emerges as a mini-fountain in your mini-garden.
Even without an electric pump, you can still produce mini-fountains this way. Just pour water into the upper tank and the little fountains will rise and play for quite a while. This ‘gravity’ method – a higher pool or tank feeding separate pipes to each fountain – is the way fountains in all historic gardens were powered, whether at Shalamar in Pakistan or Chatsworth in England.
On some electric pumps, you can adjust the size of the flow. This can mean that it can directly feed a ‘brimming pool’, where water flows up into a garden, without the fountain jet being too large for your garden’s scale. A test with one cheap electric pump showed that it would simultaneously feed both a miniature ‘brimming pool’ and a higher pool, which itself fed by gravity some mini-fountains. This pump was only 7cm x 5cm x 4cm in size and could easily be hidden.
What flows in, should flow out
You can leave almost all these technical aspects of mini-fountains and watercourses to the actual construction stage. The details have been mentioned only to convey the opportunities. However, you must plan for where the water from fountains and watercourses would go. There has to be some channel whereby incoming water eventually leaves the garden or you’ll turn it into a miniature bog!