What To Do With Dish Gardens After The Show

 Sometimes I get asked at a show if I put my dish gardens together right before the show. And as an after-question, then do I take them back apart.

The answer is NO! I sometimes keep my dish gardens mostly intact for up to a year and sometimes longer.

It's very hard to find the "miniature trees" and larger plants for the gardens. It is also hard to train them to have a root system that is not deep (like in a pot) but very flat. Keeping them in their dish makes things much easier .

There are so many great accessories to put in a miniature garden that if you haven't made one, you probably really should!

Even stores like Michael's has little stuff like these cakes and soda!

 After the show I leave the dish intact until some of it starts to look old and worn. It's nice to have them as a decoration in a porch or outside on a patio table. Yes, they can get rained on.

When it's time to take out the decorations and accessories it's also probably time to remove some of the plants that either grew too large or started to get brown and aren't very attractive anymore.

This is the dish after it's cleaned up. It goes on a table by some patio doors and continues to exist happily till spring.

When it's time to fix it up for the show I look again at what needs to be trimmed or removed. I trim up the big "tree" and then re-plant and re-decorate with a different landscape plan and different "toys". No one wants to see the same one year after year.




This one was a very different type of design and a very interesting one to work with. The small tree is actually a small fruit tree that you might find growing and producing fruit (when grown to an adult size) in Brazil.

The changing depth of the dish and the challenge to get the right size plants was part of the fun.

After the show, this one didn't stay looking good for more than a month or two. It needed a big clean up.

The tree will stay in the container till spring and the rest.... might or might not make it that long.

I can certainly put some "decorations" in there if I choose, but for now it goes alongside the other dish and is growing out till spring.

The tree can be gently lifted into another shallow dish or even moved around in this dish. It's just easier to not repot it in a deep pot and start from scratch each time I want to use the tree.

Some of my "trees" I've had for years. One of them is likely 10 years old now. To find the baby-bonsai and purchase them as a bonsai is expensive. If you can find a houseplant that is sort of "tree-shaped" and keep trimming on it periodically, you have a much cheaper tree and a nice houseplant to enjoy year round.

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