St. Louis Post Dispatch October 17, 2002

Style West Section - Enchanted Enclaves

By Becky Homan - Post Dispatch Garden Editor

Linda Wiggen Kraft is on a quest. Apologies to the Beatles, but she's launched her own. Personal magical mystery tour .Her search is for something called fairy gardens.
Already, she's been commissioned for designs of several St. Louis-area enclaves-all to be decorated with little fairy figurines, fairy furniture and dwarf fairy-garden plants.

The woman also has some fairy themes in her own back yard in University City.She's even in the midst of teaching a first ever "Creating a Fairy Garden" class at the Missouri Botanical Garden. (A similar class may be offered there again in the spring.)

But recent travels have begun taking Wiggen Kraft around the country in search of gardens built for people who like to think that they are in a spiritual, if not enchanted place.
The relatively new Enchanted Woods at Winterthur, in Delaware's Brandywine Valley, may be her favorite, to date. She loves that garden's swirl of "story stones" for instance, on which children and grown-ups sit to hear storytellers spin yarns. She recalls the surprising moment of stepping into a Winterthur "fairy ring", surrounded by ankle-high mushrooms carved from wood. Instantly, sensors in one triggered the start of a vaporized mist that rose up to her knees. And off on one wooded path, there is a charming, little thatched-roof "Faerie Cottage" for children to explore.

She was a Winterthur last Sept. 11. And after a brief and moving ceremony to honor victims of that date's tragedy in 2001, visitors went about the business of finding joy and solace in the garden.
"All cultures have had the idea of fairies" says Wiggen Kraft. "Maybe they call them something different, but the idea of little spirits inhabiting a woods or garden has been around since ancient times."

She's become a fan of this way of gardening because "it's a very comforting kind of thing" she says. "It also gives you permission to be childlike and get out of the box of thinking. ''I'm an adult and I can only see the world as an adult. This is a way to see things differently."

The grown-up craze for miniatures of all kinds of tiny, furnished doll houses indoors, little railroad gardens outside, also helps fuel the fairy trend.
The renewed popularity of books from the 1920's by Mary Cicely Baker, do, too. That author's classic "Flower Fairies" series of books conbines colorful, delicate flowers with romantic images of fairies. There is a botanical accuracy to the drawings as well. Among the plants in Baker's garden, for instance are:

- Candytuft (Iberis sempervirens), a low-growing perennial that loves sun and dry soil. Look for a while cultivar called "Snowflake."

- Daffodil (Narcissus), including "Little Gem", for instance, a miniature, early-blooming, clear-yellow trumpet growing to about 5 inches tall, in sun an dry soils.

- Forget-me-not (Myosotis sylvatica), a cherful little blue-flowered plant that sometimes performs as an annual and will take sun or shade but prefers moist soils.

- Scilla (Scilla siberica), a four-inch-tall, early-spring-blooming bulb with bell-shaped blue flowers (sun, well-drained soil).

- Tulip (Tulipa humilis), "Eastern Star", for instance, one of the species tulips, six inches tall, with magenta-rose exterior and canary-yellow interior (sun, well-drained soil).

But any dwarf planting will do. From the little Polyantha series of roses, "The Fairy" and it's low growing cousins, "Sea Foam" and "Fairy Dance" are perfect additions to a sunny fairy bed.
And in Wiggen Kraft's own shaded fairy space behind her house are dwarf hostas and basic impatiens, the latter pinched to stay compact. A small bird's nest, little twig chairs and table, plus small ceramic fairy-found objects, as well as purchases from Web sites finish her particular garden look.

A British visitor to Wiggen Kraft's home says she's long had interest in this kind of world. Robyn Roberts says that fairy cakes - what Americans call cup cakes - are the standard fare at children's birhtday parties in England. The tops of those little cakes are slices off, divided and iced into place to look like fairy wings. The last flourish is a dotting of gumdrops and othe candies. The two women took fairy cakes on a recent trip to Winterthur. And they happened to meet the garden's landscape architect, whose birthday it was. They all celebrated it in the Enchanted Garden with homemade fairy cakes from St. Louis.

"There's more of an interest in children's gardens," Roberts says of this country and her homeland. "They're just becoming more popular. "And what do you think of when you think of children in a garden?" she asks. And then she answers: "You think of things that are magical and mystical."