A not-so-mini trend The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop is the next big thing for the crafters and gardeners already captivated by gardening small. Organized by playful themes-including gardens around the world, holidays, and fantasy gardens-it's a fun-filled guide to creating one-of-a-kind gardens and the accessories that make them shine. Thirty-seven projects are included with fully illustrated, step-by-step instructions. For a Japanese garden, you will learn how to create a miniature sand garden. For a Halloween garden, you'll learn how to make a flying ghost and zombie. And for a space garden, you'll learn how to make a tiny space ship and alien. The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop is for anyone enchanted by the whimsy of creating a tiny world. The Gardening in Miniature Prop Shop is a fun-filled guide to creating unique accessories to use in miniature gardens. It features 37 projects with full-color, easy-to-follow instructions, and tips and techniques for building themed gardens. Janit Calvo is an artist, miniaturist, gardener, and entrepreneur whose creativity makes diminutive scenes come to life. Her first living miniature garden was a tiny stage backdrop that grew and wove itself together for years. Inspired by the little garden's long life and easy maintenance, Janit started Two Green Thumbs Miniature Garden Center in 2001. Janit has won many garden and miniature show awards, and her gardens have appeared in the Seattle Times, Dig Magazine, and Dollhouse Miniature Magazine. Her website is TwoGreenThumbs.com. She resides with her husband in a full-size house and garden in Seattle, Washington. Introduction There is no other pastime as diverse, adaptable, and accessible as gardening in miniature. It is a collection of a number of other hobbies merged into a single incredibly creative one. And it appears that we've taken the best and easiest aspects of these leisure pursuits and left the hardest parts of them behind. We don't break our backs gardening and landscaping: we use spoons for shovels, forks for rakes, and we find ways to grow slow and small. We play with plants and with the garden. We casually build small hills and dales in our gardens; we eortlessly carve riverbeds and move property boundaries on a whim. We dream of different ways to plant and repurpose tiny plots morning, noon, and night. We begin a fresh garden design from scratch with every new pot we pick up, or every garden bed we till, something full-size gardeners simply cannot do. We can appreciate all kinds of miniature and dwarf plants and include leggy shrubs and broken trees in our work because we will use them as authentic additions to our miniature garden scenes. We adore tiny conifers with their little buds and needles not as collectors, but because they are genuine landscape trees in miniature. We don't practice the art of bonsai, but we will gladly use its ancient techniques for pruning and looking at plants in a new way. We use the same bonsai-tree starts but instead of cropping off the roots to fit them into shallow trays, we lovingly place them, uncut root ball and all, into our miniature gardens as delicious anchor trees and hang tiny swings or birdhouses from them. Instead of spending hours indoors renovating a dollhouse, we take our miniatures outside and put them in the soil. We can complete a garden from start to nish in a couple of hours; that's a feat seldom heard of in the dollhouse world. We don't craft just anything and everything either; our projects have to rev up our imaginations, fill our hearts, fit into our tiny gardens, and be special enough to warrant giving up such valuable real estate. We are versatile crafters as long as it has something to do with the miniature garden. We dabble in masonry, mosaics, woodworking, painting, and

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