Make Your Own Secret Garden

I love the book The Secret Garden. I liked the idea of my own secret place where animals and birds could come and live and my friends and I could be by ourselves. So, for my birthday, my dad and I built me my own secret garden.

Here is how we did it.

Try Making Your Own Secret Garden

To start, you have to pick a corner of your yard and put a fence up. Or you could put a garden on your porch. To get animals and butterflies into your secret garden you'll need:

Fresh Food
Fresh water
Shelter from cats and sun
Safe nesting spots

To find out what kind of garden birds like, first we got this book -- The National Wildlife Federation's Guide to Gardening for Wildlife : How to Create a Beautiful Backyard Habitat for Birds, Butterflies and Other Wild Things.

Food: We found out that to feed birds and butterflies, you have to plant things that flower or make fruit, nectar, nuts and seeds all year, or you can put bird feeders up. I like hummingbirds, so we planted a trumpet vine plant for them. Goldfinches love thistle seed, so my dad got a feeder with thistle seeds. My butterfly garden came from a Burpee seed package.

Water: Birdbaths are really expensive so we didn't buy one. We used the top of a trash can turned upside down. All you need is a big circle with a rim around it to hold the water. Then we put a hose dripping water into it

I really like butterflies. I wanted lots and lots of butterflies in my Secret Garden. So I got this book too: The Butterfly Book : A Kid's Guide to Attracting, Raising, and Keeping Butterflies, by Kersten Hamilton

Shelter:We stopped trimming our bushes in the back yard to give the birds lots of places to hide in. If you have a cat, put a bell on it to warn the birds. Dogs kill birds too, so your garden has to be away from dogs and cats.

I imagined that the real Secret Garden would look a lot like the one in this book. It was "the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine..." with "high walls to shut it in" and a gate with a lock on it. So, my dad put a big fence around the end of our yard. We're growing ivy on the fence to shut it in, but it's not grown yet. He did put a gate in - a big wooden one with a lock just for me and my friends. We got a stone bench to sit on from the gardening store. I didn't want to wait, so we got pots full of flowers that were grown. Now my garden looks almost like the one in the book.

Don't Forget

Nesting Spots: I got a sparrow nesting box and we put it on the fence.

No Chemicals:Something else you have to do is stop using insect sprays and pesticides in your garden because they hurt birds and wildlife. My dad buys cans of live lady bugs and they eat lots of bad bugs. Extra birds in the yard mean less bugs too.

I hope you try making your own beautiful and magic Secret Garden this spring.

	Clubhouse \| Amy's Room \| Geri \| Rachel \| Tessa \| Book Club \| Site Map
	Since 1996, your space on the web : written and edited by 90 girls and teens from all over the world. Mission Feedback Newsletter Write FOR us Contact Us Advertise