One of my favorite rides in Disneyland is the Storybook Land Canal Boats; I love seeing entire Disney kingdoms up close! And when I couldn’t come up with a creative way to decorate a small strip of dirt outside my window, my mom had a great idea: build your own scene like in the Canal Boats!
Given the size and slope of the space I had to work with, I decided to build Arendelle, the kingdom from Frozen. I browsed online to get some ideas, and found out about a gardening trend called “fairy gardens”. Fairy gardens are tiny little homes you can put inside your own garden, and they’re often incredibly detailed. You can buy tons of miniature decorations to include in your own project on sites like Amazon or in basically any craft store. Fairy garden pieces would work perfectly for a Storybook Garden, but I decided I wanted mine to be on a slightly larger scale. So I went to Michaels, bought some birdhouses, and started painting like crazy! (A word of advice: cover the holes to keep little animals and bugs from taking over your little buildings).
Here’s the before picture:
And after:
Here’s a close up of the castle:
A view of the village from the castle:
Wandering Oaken’s Trading Post:
And a wide view of Arendelle:
My Storybook Garden is still a work in progress. I couldn’t find anything I liked for the ice palace or a main street, and the whole area is definitely in serious need of some green. But putting this together has been really fun and a great creative outlet, so I’d definitely recommend trying it out. You can build virtually any Disney kingdom, or even invent one of your own. The possibilities are endless!
This is a cute idea. I do hope you keep with building yours! I’m sure once you add the green it will look wonderful. Too bad you don’t have a stream to build it around, haha.
Thanks, Daniela. When I lived on the east coast, my backyard had a stream with little pools that would’ve worked perfectly for all kinds of Disney scenes. I wish I had thought of it back then!