Saikei with Asparagus Fern

Well, the Christmas Holiday is almost here and as usual, before Christmas Holiday, teachers and kids organize different thematic parties: about Christmas, Santa, New Year Eve, human history, mythology, wild nature or animals.
We realized a living miniature garden / Saikei with asparagus fern, accent plants, moss and ground cover grasses (we used also immature plants in this tray landscape) for one of the classes of the school from neighborhood. The school show theme was: "Mountain plateau in the shadow of forest".

Saikei / miniature garden with seven asparagus fern plants - schema

On this occasion, for this living mini-garden we choose a big rounded unglazed tray (36 cm diameter). We covered the bottom of the tray with base soil and placed one big stone in the rear-center of the tray (you can see the detailed schema of composition).

The rock was collected from the pristine wilderness of Harrison River in one of our weekend-trip and is a grayish mountain stone that slopes gracefully and resembles a mountain. Its rough surface induces the age impression and its small crevices suggest were created by rapidly moving waters.

 We planted seven Asparagus Fern plants (3 big used as foreground view and  4 small plants used as a distant view) and formed three mounds (right-foreground, left-foreground and immediately behind left-foreground mound) separated by gravel sliding (gravel were also added around mountain slopes).





 We chosen Asparagus Fern because they look like a grove of trees and suggest many trunks growing from a single root system.  Asparagus fern (named also Asparagus Densiflorus,  Sprenger's Asparagus, Asparagus Sprengeri) is a weed native to South Africa from Liliaceae family used often as an ornamental plant because its delicate, feathery foliage that looks like a fern and can reach 45-60 cm high.

Asparagus fern is a low maintenance plant that can be grown quite easily indoor (the plant prefers bright light, though it can tolerate low light conditions as well).

We considered the overall effect of the entire composition and tried to emphasize the characteristics of gravel, accent plants, moss and ground-cover plants when covered the whole surface of this Saikei.

This custom tray landscape was made considering the suggestions of the teacher who organized the show and was very appreciated by audience - children, teachers and parents.

Click & drag to interact with the next 3D object movie.
If zoomed in, you can hold the SHIFT key to move the image with the mouse.