By Wren Smith
Originally published January/February 2011
When we encourage creativity and tactile, hands-on contact with plants, we provide visitors a passport through the Green Door. On the other side of the Green Door awaits a playground, and like any good playground, it is also a school. Much of the learning in this playground happens where our five senses, stimulated by a heightened level of engagement with tangible touchable nature, activate our sixth sense—the imagination.
The seedpods of the wild indigo catch my eye and I pause to inspect. “These would make excellent boats for the fairy folks,” I muse as I pick a few and hold the dried pea-like pods in my hand. Disturbed by my presence, a white-throated sparrow flies from a nearby clump of switch grass. I heard his plaintive, “poor-sam-peabody-peabody” call earlier in the week, but now the snowy patch of feathers on his throat suggests that winter is at hand. My garden has been transformed from the lush vitality of the growing season to more somber shades of tan, gray, and brown. Yet despite the change of palette, I have once again stepped through the Green Door. Regardless of the season, stopping to notice plants, to experience their texture, fragrance, or form opens us to new discoveries and reveals aspects from both the real world of nature and the imaginative world of spirit.
Volunteer naturalist Molly Teviso-Rona assists customers at the Fairy Market.
A mother sits on a rock in the woods with three small children. She turns over a play building permit and reads aloud the simple building code printed on the back of the paper. The children are squirrelly and anxious to get started, yet appear to be listening:
Be respectful of the space. Please don’t pull up living plants….Fairies prefer homes built from natural material…. Use your imagination…. Don’t be a perfectionist…. Be safe, watch for poison ivy, ticks….
As she continues reading, a little girl chirps, “What’s a perfectionist?” I can’t hear the mother’s response, but the girl nods in understanding.
Two young home builders show off their newly constructed fairy house.
A boy, perhaps six years old with eager eyes, clutches a brown bag, opens it, reaches in, and hands a quarter-size cardboard token to one of the “shopkeepers” standing across the counter at the Fairy Market. The large tables hold several shallow boxes and baskets containing an assortment of natural treasures (seedpods, dried flowers, and pieces of lichen-encrusted bark), which participants can exchange for tokens. Homebuilders for the fairy folks are allowed to use nonliving materials, fallen leaves, sticks, stones, etc., found within the permitted building zone, but all other materials must be “purchased” with tokens.
“Is this the one you want?” a fairy-clad shopkeeper asks, as she leans across the counter to meet the youngster’s gaze. “Oh, that will indeed make a great stairway!” she says. Her eyes twinkle as she hands the carefully selected piece of grapevine tendril to the young builder. The shopkeeper then inquires as to how many more tokens the boy has in his bag.
“Eight,” he responds after a brief calculation. “This is my second purchase, I’ll be back,” he says, looking over his shoulder as he dashes away clutching the miniature stairway in one hand and his bag of tokens in the other.
A father crouches on the ground and peers into a hollow log recently converted into a fairy house. His children, a little boy and a younger girl, are beaming with pride. “Look Daddy, we used these little sticks to make a fenced-in-yard,” says the boy as he points to the toothpick-size fence posts, lined up to form a small enclosure.
“And I made them a bathtub from this curled up leaf,” chimes the girl, “and look we found an empty snail shell for their living room. We gave them a fireplace, a bed, a couch and everything.” The father oohs and aahs, then shows off the miniature swing set he just added to the fairy’s backyard. Who says fairy house building is just for kids?
Fairy houses are left behind as monuments to the imagination.
Building Inspector Deanna Rushing looks official with her cap, badge, and clipboard as she patrols the new construction in the High-Density Zone of the Fairy Village. While she could issue tickets for infractions of the building code, she encounters few of them. Mostly she and the other volunteer building inspectors are on hand to offer suggestions, minimize the impact on the grounds, and ensure that safety concerns like poison ivy and ticks are addressed.
After volunteering as a building inspector for Bernheim’s Fairy Village, Deanna is charmed. “Once participants select their site and have a chance to explore it, their imaginations expand.” she says. They discover all sorts of possibilities in the bits of bark, twigs, and such. The velvety leaves of common mullein and lambs ear (both available at the Fairy Market) might make great blankets or fairy upholstery, but there is something about getting to know a place tactilely that helps feed the imagination. Some twigs are sturdy yet flexible; pieces of sloughed bark are versatile and can be fashioned into tables, porches, overhangs, and even walls. The large waxy leaves of the southern magnolia feel like perfect fairy roofing material.
Deanna reports that children and their parents (also grandparents, uncles, and aunts) constructed their tiny dwellings with a real focus on making comfortable homes for the fairies. But according to Deanna, comfort wasn’t the only principle that guided their process. She said, “Some considered hygiene, nutrition, community, and lots of ways to have fun. There were climbing ropes and vines to get to different areas of the house, soft velvety couches or chairs made from mullein leaves, dried flowers and hickory nut shells, indoor and outdoor showers. There were lots of ‘secret’ places for fairies to do things that we might not be privy to—places drawn by the imagination but respectfully unexamined, lest the fairies find it uninhabitable. I think the kids’ and parents’ imaginations meet on equal footing.”
This fairy village and the magic of this day were a direct result of my involvement with NAI. In February 2009 during the NAI Region 3 Workshop in western Kentucky, Michael Kirschman, division director for Mecklenburg County Nature Preserves, approached me with his usual enthusiastic greetings. Then he added, “Wren, of all people, you have to incorporate a fairy house festival into your programming!”
Michael knew that I would be receptive to his suggestion. He’d seen some of the little fairy creatures I make from natural materials. He may have known that I made fairy houses and occasionally incorporated them into programs and activities over the years, but he correctly assumed that I had never hosted a fairy house festival. Michael’s enthusiasm was contagious as he shared how the staff at the Latta Plantation near Charlotte, North Carolina, pulled off an amazing fairy house festival the previous February. With Michael’s encouragement, photos, and statistics from the first fairy house festival and marketing ideas (such as adding a costume contest) shared by Gail Lemiec, the genius behind their event, I was able to successfully petition our programs committee to include fairy house building in a major event at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. Bloomfest was on the calendar as a new annual spring event. But we needed something besides the scheduled plant lectures, hikes, and plant sales—something that may have broader appeal to families with small children. Thus when Bernheim lunched our first Bloomfest in May 2009, we incorporated our first fairy house village as a major part of the day’s activities.
We didn’t know what to expect. Some co-workers questioned the connection between making fairy houses and our mission (connecting people with nature). Some suggested that this sort of activity would probably appeal only to little girls of a certain age. Others were concerned about the potential for resource destruction. As interpreters, we know that an idea is only as good as its execution, and the execution is only as good as the marketing and organization of supplies and volunteers.
Our plans needed to address and minimize the impact on the building site and limit “willy-nilly” collecting of natural materials by visitors. Sometimes when you address one problem you create new opportunities. It occurred to me that we could limit the temptation of visitors to collect outside our designated “fairy construction zone” if we established a place for them to obtain additional materials, thus the Fairy Market. Here shoppers could select from a large variety of interesting natural materials (dried flowers, seed pods, grape vine tendrils). These materials were carefully collected and organized weeks in advance by staff and volunteers.
To prevent greedy grabbing of the market’s materials, we gave each permit holder a bag of 10 tokens (leftover leaf-shaped cutouts from a local greeting card factory). An unexpected bonus in establishing this market is that not only did it limit unbridled collecting of natural materials, it also gave participants an opportunity to touch and learn about the real world of nature in a more thoughtful manner. Shoppers at the Fairy Market selected from a variety of interesting natural materials spread out smorgasbord fashion. They encountered interpreters who in the guise of shopkeepers answered questions or added enough guided commentary to be helpful without being intrusive. The large acorn caps from saw tooth and bur oaks were favorite bathtub fixtures and the velvety red inflorescence of the giant cockscomb where especially popular as “upscale” pillows and upholstery materials.
Young builders practiced math and budgeting as they deliberated each purchase. A shopper might purchase a grapevine tendril for one token, or select a honey locust pod in exchange for two tokens. One basket contained dried flowers and a sign reading, “1 token = 5 flowers”.
In the construction zone, children and their parents freely searched and found all sorts of building materials such as pieces of bark, hollow logs, rocky grottos, and an assortment of “builders twigs”—the all-important structural support supplied by the various twigs and branches in the shape of letters, including Y, V, T, and W. In the process of searching, participants not only developed a more intimate connection with the plants, they also discovered creatures from the other kingdoms.
Even though the morning brought showers and limited construction, the afternoon clearing allowed fairy houses to spring up like mushrooms after a rain. Visitors built 106 fairy houses in just a few hours. Most of these were constructed by families. Moms, dads, and children were down on their haunches, looking closely at twigs, rocks, leaves. They were touching the earth and being touched by it. I like to imagine that they had stepped through the Green Door. They had certainly entered the place where children (and those of us who are still children at heart) are able to express the inner world of the spirit while connecting more intimately with the real world of nature.
It is easy to help your visitors step through the Green Door. There is no magic word to incant, no lock to fumble with, and no key to turn. Instead turn your attention to the green and growing things. With a little imagination, you and your visitors will more fully encounter the complexities and mysteries of the natural world. In the process you may not only discover the intricacies of aster blossoms and hollyhocks, but also the tiny stars and fairy gowns hidden there.
Recommended Reading
Sobel, David. (2001.) Children’s Special Places: Exploring the Role of Forts, Dens, and Bush Houses in Middle Childhood. Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press.
Wren Smith is the interpretive programs manager for Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest in Kentucky. Reach her at 502-955-8512, x227 or Wren@bernheim.org.
