Guest Post: Garden Fairies Write About Themselves

New buds in August? Yep.

Garden fairies here.

We are garden fairies and we are once again having to take control of this blog before it withers away and becomes as bare as a maple tree in the winter time.

Carol said she was going to post less frequently when she got to 2,000 posts and she has, sort of.  We counted and she has posted four times in the last ten days and we have posted once and then there is this post, which is six posts divided by 10 days carry the 2 and divide by the number of garden fairies, and well, we don’t want to over complicate things but really, we are garden fairies.

We believe, based on our own observations, that Carol is off working on a secret project or reading those Harry Potter books or both, instead of posting on this blog.

Since we garden fairies know that fairies are mentioned in those Harry Potter books, along with all manner of other creatures, we thought we would take this opportunity to set the record straight in regards to garden fairies.

So without further ado, explanation, interruption, or long, meaningless sentences which might cause readers to abandon hope and click on “delete”, here are 21 interesting facts about garden fairies.

1.  Garden fairies are not magical. We are not like witches, warlocks, house-elves, trolls and those of that ilk. We do not traffic in spells, potions, jinxes, curses, hexes or any other such nonsense.   What we do, we do on our own accord.

1.  Garden fairies have wings, but we do not use them for flying, per se.  Really, flying is for the birds, literally, and it is just ridiculous to think of garden fairies flying about the garden like a bunch of goldfinches.  Nope, we are garden fairies, we merely use our wings for extra long hops and maybe a bit of hovering about the garden.

2.  Garden fairies are actually very busy in most gardens.  Who do you think opens flowers in the morning and closes them up in the evening? Or, opens them in the evening and closes them in the morning? And we have to keep track of which ones to open at which times, based on strict schedules which are set based on a variety of factors including season, temperature, rainfall, type of flower, etc.

3.  Garden fairies do not like to over complicate things so we will not go into great details on how we figure out when to open flowers.  Or paint leaves. Yes, we paint leaves in the fall. It is quite a production, as you can imagine, to paint all those leaves and keep track of which leaves should be which color especially when two trees which should have different colored fall leaves are touching each other and their branches are intermingled. We leave (hey, a pun!) that painting to our most experienced garden fairies like Ol’ Tangle Rainbowfly.

5.  A group of garden fairies is called a giggle. Don’t laugh. And a group of pillywiggins, which are English garden fairies, is called a puddle because they are from a rainy climate and often like to gether around interesting puddles.  We do not know the origin of “giggle” to describe a group of garden fairies, however.  And not to confuse things, it is not wrong to also call a group of pillywiggins a giggle, but regular groups of garden fairies are not generally known as puddles.  Got that?

8. A favorite sport of garden fairies is the Orthoptera Rodeo. We gather up wild grasshoppers, katydids, and crickets, all members of the insect order Orthoptera, saddle them up and see how long we can ride them before they throw us off.  You should see how high they can jump with garden fairies on their backs. Of course, no garden fairies ever get hurt during the Orthoptera Rodeo because we just use our little wings to fly off right before we get thrown off.  For the wee little garden fairies, we saddle up a praying mantis, which is in the order Mantodea, and let them ride it. Perfectly tame, perfectly harmless, and they get a big kick out of it.

13. Garden fairies do sometimes migrate indoors in the wintertime where they can cause mischief, especially around the Christmas tree, the toaster, and the house plants.  We are garden fairies, it is harmless fun, just to bide our time through the winter. And if we are around the right kinds of house plants, we can keep up on our flower opening and closing skills while we rest.

21. Garden fairies do occasionally have a little fun in the garden. It isn’t all opening flowers and painting leaves.  We hide garden gloves, move tools, and scatter seeds in odd locations.  For really great fun, we’ll actually move plants around in the garden and then wait to see the gardeners’ puzzled looks when they try to figure out what happened.  They look where the plant is, where they think the plant should have been, and then scratch their heads. Oh, goodness my blooming radishes, the look on their faces is always the same and priceless. Good, clean garden fairy fun.

34.  And a final bonus fact. Wow, we are up to 34 already?  That is because we garden fairies count according to the Fionacci sequence. We are garden fairies. We live in and around nature, so that’s the counting we know.

We reckon that 34 facts is quite enough information about us, though it is not all the information about us. We are garden fairies.   Thank you for reading this far.

Submitted by:

Thorn Goblinfly, Chief Scribe for the Garden Fairies at May Dreams Gardens