Have you always admire those personal beautiful miniature gardens that are placed on tables? I do. I find them so pretty, adding colors which can bring a smile to my face and brighten up my morning. And it is pretty expensive to buy one, and it is much more fun making your own garden rather than buying straight from store. You can think up of so many possible themes you want for your gardens and I am sure you can’t do that when you get a ready-made one

So I am the kind of person who prefer to make my own so I opted for going for workshop with my friends because I wanted to make it a girls’ outing with two of my besties. They were also game on making one for themselves too! I just love them to bits. <3 So we make a reservation for the workshop at Hort Park (The Plant Story) and we went there to choose the type of dome and plants.

Look at this! When we stepped in, we were greeted with so many beautiful plants that we just had to stop and take pictures before approaching the person for our workshop. I cannot catch the name of the person who taught us, but she was really sweet and patient, and I chatted with her for a bit and found out that she actually worked there for 2 years as part time helper, and she was once a customer herself. She led us to choose the glass dome and leave us to wander around to choose the plants we want.

Personally, I chose desert garden because they are a lot easier to take care and I just love cactus too! Just look at their displays of desert garden series!

 

 

They have other types of series like air gardens and rainforests which more pictures can be found in their website. I haven’t got the time to take photo because we got to get started since we only have two hours for the workshop. And sadly, I didn’t managed to take any picture during the process of making our gardens because of our hands being in gloves and handling soil. But just want to show you the colorful sand that we use as well as the

 

We all started out making our gardens with our own concept in mind. For me personally, as I am making this for my fiance’s birthday, I went for the more rugged look. So I try to avoid using colorful sands (but I am so tempted to use all of them!) and use only blue sand for my base and mostly gravel thereafter. Soil came in as the third layer as we need to put the cactus in after that before we finally decorate the top using gravel and sand, making sure that our plants were very stable. Getting the sand, gravel and plants is really very tough for beginners like us even though the glass dome opening is so big!

And to think that I initially wanted to choose a dewdrop shape with a very small hole. I think I will cry with frustration trying to put the cactus in and getting pricked in the process. My friend got pricked and the thorn got stuck inside her thumb which refused to come out and she has to make do with it the whole day. Poor her.

 

And the final outcome?

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Ta-dah!

 

 

And so my birthday gift to my fiance:

The mushroom alone costs SGD $5 (which I am like OMGAWD…So expensive!) But when my friend bought a red and blue mushroom for her garden, I just couldn’t resist it and went ahead to buy a red mushroom and adding in to my garden. I choose two cactus…one small and extremely spiky (the more spikey it is, the longer is its survival rate as explained by the person who guided us) and a long cactus, followed by rocks and rocks and rocks! OMG! I love how it turns out that I didn’t want to give it away (I hope he is not reading this).

 

 

And he loves it 🙂

Try making yours too!

There are plenty of tutorials going around in the net which you can learn it yourself, or you can grab your friends to attend the workshop…which I feel it is more fun because of so many laughters and interactions with one another and helping each other hold the plants steady while another one help to push soil and rocks to secure the plants. It was so much fun! 😉