Sun/shade requirements

Full sun

USDA Zones

7a-10b

Habit

Dwarf compact upright

Container suggestions

Though figs grow best in Zones 8-10, they can be successful in protected locations in Zones 5-7. 'Little Miss Figgy' is best grown in containers in full sun. Containers must be brought indoors in winter. Large containers may be overwintered in greenhouses, garages or basements.

How long has it been on the market?

Introduced and patented in 2017, it is available from the Sunset Western Garden Collection and Southern Living’s DownHome Harvest Collection.

Grows to height/width

4–6' tall / 3–4' wide

Flower color

Prolific, dark purple fruits in late summer

Foliage

Dark green, deeply lobed deciduous leaves

Key features

‘Little Miss Figgy’ is smaller and more cold-hardy than comparable figs, yet she bears prolific fruits spring and fall. Attracts birds and butterflies, tolerates clay soil, drought and heat-tolerant.

Display tip

Show with other ornamental fruit trees or pair with interesting fig recipes to give gardeners fun ideas and reasons to take one home.

Consumer care requirements

Water before planting. Plant in full sun to part shade. Dig a hole three times the width of pot. Backfill and plant 1"-2" above soil level. Water and add more soil if needed. Mulch plants and water regularly during the growing season but reduce watering in fall.

You don’t need to know a single note of music to appreciate the quality that makes Music of the Spheres® the Stradivarius of windchimes®. These symphonic-quality chimes are carefully tuned to A440, standard orchestral pitch. Their rich harmonies transform the outdoor environment, giving rise to their motto: world peace, one backyard at a time!® Superlative musicality, design, engineering, and materials create a perceived-value product customers appreciate.

Quality components and painstaking hand-craftsmanship make the chime highly durable and weather-resistant. The tempered aluminum alloy tubing is custom-manufactured to exacting specifications and will never rust. The tubing is coated with a sleek black corrosion-protective finish that provides durability in all kinds of outdoor environments (acid rain, salt air, etc.). Heavy gauge polished stainless steel rings provide sturdy support and enduring beauty. UV-stabilized synthetic braid cordage is highly resistant to abrasion, ultra-violet degradation, rot and mildew. Solid UV-stabilized polyethylene clappers provide superior tonal quality and outdoor durability. Seven and fifteen year warranties result.

The elegant design features central tube suspension, with smoothly polished tube ends to prevent cord abrasion. Their unique interchangeable/ detachable windcatcher provides activity control thusly: The chimes are designed to play in eight to ten mile per hour breezes. By replacing the windcatcher that comes on the chime with a larger windcatcher, less wind is needed; conversely, when the chime is installed in a windy location, a smaller windcatcher will be useful.

The founder, the gifted musician Larry Roark, used his degree in music theory and his knowledge of physics to recreate musical tunings found throughout the world. The chimes he created are available in eleven different musical scales and seven different sizes, each a half-octave deeper than the next.

By hanging multiple chimes in the same musical tuning but in different sizes in proximity, you can create an ensemble or singing-in-parts effect. You can also blend musical tunings by adding companion scales. By combining the tunings and sizes, your customers can literally create a backyard symphony. Two chimes sound awesome together, but adding more make for an amazing experience. Retailers find it a snap to sell multiple chimes to the very same customers to enhance further their backyard ambiance.

Once the customer has experienced for himself the difference their music makes in his quality of life, Music of the Spheres windchimes will become his go-to gift for weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, and even new baby and memorial gifts. When he realizes that all components and the windchimes themselves are 100% American-made, his decision will be even easier!

Making your decision to carry Music of the Spheres easier is their 90-day guaranteed buy-back program, and several display options.

For more information, visit www.motschimes.com or call 888-3CHIMES (888 324 4637).

A few years ago, fairy gardening captured the world by storm and the demand for fantastical accessories and tiny plantscapes was in full force. Now, fairy gardening has evolved into miniature gardening, and it’s capturing much of the same market that found appeal in fairy gardening. It’s the latest boom in the small plant category, and we talked to three IGCs to find out how retailers are making the most of “mini.”

What’s the difference?

Fairy gardening and mini gardening share a lot of the same qualities, but it mostly boils down to differences in marketing and accessories (or lack thereof).

“Over the years it’s expanded into so many more categories beyond fairies, whether it’s gnomes, animals or frogs. Just about everything you can think of is now available in miniature,” says Kris Shepard, owner of Caan Floral & Greenhouses.

As time went on, and accessories expanded, the “fairy” moniker tended to overlap with the term “mini gardening.” Shepard says the terminology created more mass appeal, since the fairy gardening category slanted toward the female demographic.

“We probably peaked on fairy gardening three or four years ago. We’ve cut our SKU counts and space allotment for it down some, but it’s still very viable,” Shepard says.

According to Mark Leichty, director of business development at Little Prince of Oregon Nursery, the focus on fairy gardening is more about creating whimsical scenes with little buildings and accessories, whereas miniature gardening focuses more on the plants.

“I think that there are still people involved in fairy gardening, but we don’t get nearly as many calls about it as we do about small plants for small spaces, both indoors and outdoors,” Leichty says.

At Little Prince of Oregon Nursery, the mini gardening category captures a similar demographic as its houseplant category, which primarily tilts toward young women.

“I think that’s the biggest demographic that we’re seeing our biggest sales growth in,” Leichty says.

Like Leichty, Shepard says the demand is hot for plants, and less so for accessories.

“I think the fairy garden or miniature plants haven’t really slowed down, but the accessories have come off of their peak that we had around 2017, 2018. We see it on the decline for sure and we’ve adjusted our inventory levels appropriately,” Shepard says.

Adjusting for demand

Ray Weigand’s Nursery has had an altogether difficult experience with the fairy and miniature gardening category over the past couple of years. Wendy Bohn, event coordinator and online store manager, says the IGC got out of the category last year due to several reasons.

“Unfortunately, kids want what they want and when they were told ‘no’ sometimes helped themselves. Parents would occasionally return the pieces they discovered once home, but that was far and few between,” Bohn says. “Pieces that were played with while their parents shopped created breakage that would just get left sitting there, or we would find them spread out around the nursery.”

As more companies started carrying and making pieces, demand was reduced because accessories were easy to find everywhere. Another issue was the keeping and care of the plants.

“It was a very high labor department between the tiny plants requiring watering twice a day, pricing individual pieces, unpacking them, inventory control and then the constant cleaning and straightening up of the entire area,” Bohn says. “It would take a couple of people a day to manage it. We made the decision to eliminate it and clearance out the remaining pieces.”

The nursery repurposed the category by expanding its water gardening department. The extra space gave way for more lifestyle displays of patio water garden bowls, concrete, tabletop and natural rock fountains, along with natural rock Japanese-style lanterns, Easter Island sculptures and Buddhist-styled Zen pieces, Bohn says.

Supply and support

However, Ray Weigand’s Nursery still carries some of the specialty alpine miniature plants, and many of the annual varieties can still be used for maintaining customers’ existing mini or fairy gardens, Bohn says. An assortment of 2-inch tropical terrarium plants can also be found in the houseplant department for indoor fairy or mini gardens.

At Little Prince of Oregon Nursery, they’re ready to answer the call of customer demand. They grow at least 30 different types of small plants, which work as container houseplants or garden plants. Tender succulent varieties like echeveria and crassula are especially popular in the Pacific Northwest, he says.

“We already had a significant collection of small dwarf plants and we see a growing trend for people who want a small plant, say for a tabletop arrangement or something indoors that’s easy to care for. We’re working at building up our collection of teeny tiny plants,” Leichty says.

At the height of the fairy gardening craze, Ray Weigand’s Nursery held classes to support the hobby. Bohn says they hosted workshops for adults that averaged $50-$75 per person with a max of 30 people per workshop.

They also held less expensive workshops that were simplified and smaller for kids and also offered birthday party packages. The birthday packages included a minimum of 10 attendees, a $25 per person set price, and an 8-inch low bowl terra cotta pot with some plants, a fairy and a couple of accessory pieces.

While they didn’t offer the birthday party packages during the busiest time of year, Bohn notes that they helped fill some space after a majority of the annuals were gone during the slower summer months.

At Caan Floral & Greenhouse, fairy gardening classes were halted due to COVID-19.

“Obviously with the pandemic year, we didn’t really have any of these in-person seminars and workshops like we traditionally had for several years prior. We would hold probably 10 or 12 a year,” Shepard says.

A good way to get involved

Mini gardening can be a good way for garden centers to get children involved because it makes gardening more accessible and less intimidating for them, especially as they grow older. Plus, it can instill a passion for gardening at a young age, Shepard says.

At Little Prince of Oregon Nursery, they often share photos of miniature plants on their social media channels to draw in new gardeners. Mini plants can act as a gateway to gardening because they’re “entry-level” plants, since they are easy to care for. As the mini gardening trend expands, Leichty predicts mini outdoor gardening will take off in the next few years.

With the customer eye on mini plants, the nursery does its best to capture what’s left of the fairy gardening market through search engine optimization via Little Prince of Oregon Nursery’s online store (which launched during the pandemic). ‘Fairy gardening’ is one of the nursery’s main SEO keywords, so when customers search for that, the nursery’s website directs them to miniature plants.

“We have not slowed down this year. This has just been the craziest year imaginable for us. And as we figured out how the nursery industry was going to adapt and react to COVID, we didn’t expect it was going to be so intensely busy and that sales would be so strong,” Leichty says.

When it comes to gardening trends, fairy gardening sure has had a good run. Not to say that the hobby has completely fizzled out, but it is not the big craze it once was. But do not fret; if this was once a reliably profitable category for you, there’s no need to delete the category just yet. Instead, it might just be time to rebrand it and repurpose the plants and materials for new projects. Because tiny gardening, both indoors and out, is having a growth spurt in 2021.

Times are tight

Space, time and resources are always primary concerns for new and experienced gardeners. Not everyone — especially all the new indoor houseplant enthusiasts — has the space for big houseplants or big outdoor gardens. New plant parents, who hungrily acquired more large foliage plants in 2020 than their apartments or schedules could bear, are even starting to take “plant pauses” to reduce their plant care workload.

With growing interest in food gardening — in tight urban garden spaces, patio containers and indoors — aspiring vegetable gardeners run into struggles with standard herbs, veggies and fruits. Even trying to grow one standard-sized determinate tomato indoors can prove space-prohibitive. Forget about the indeterminate tomato types.

With so many new enthusiasts adopting both indoor plants and outdoor gardening as a hobby in 2020, let’s make it as easy as possible for them to stick with it. No matter their available space or time, or lack thereof. The answer to maximizing plant output and enjoyment when space is at a minimum? Tiny plants — both ornamental and edible.

Tiny is big

As soon as they started hitting the market a few years back, I began growing micro-tomatoes and other dwarf vegetable varieties; mostly indoors with grow lighting. You can still get a lot of harvest off mini-veggies and fruits, even though they do not take up much space. This is particularly handy if you are growing indoors on lighted grow shelves or grow tents. If customers are trying to use some of the smaller self-contained LED growing units, they will soon find that miniature varieties will not only grow better small footprints, but do not often take as much light volume to produce fruit, which I have personally found to be true when growing tiny tomatoes such as ‘Micro-Tom.’

Tiny food

I was excited to see a new book coming out in March 2021: “Micro Food Gardening: Project Plans and Plants for Growing Fruits and Veggies in Tiny Spaces” by Jen McGuinness. From miniature herbs and salad greens to tiny strawberry plants, baby beets and mini cabbages, McGuinness shows how micro gardening offers a surprisingly diverse and delicious array of edible opportunities.

Tiny houseplants

I admittedly have a big crush on all things tiny. So I would be remiss if I did not tell you about my new March 2021 book release, “Tiny Plants: Discover the joys of growing and collecting itty bitty houseplants,” which is geared towards the indoor plant parent. It is also going to hit a nerve with anyone interested in terrariums, vivariums or building mini water gardens or tiny indoor plantscapes.

When it comes to gardening under glass, many of the common plants sold at garden centers for terrarium culture simply get too big, or do not really sustain in consistently wet or high-humidity conditions. Do not get me started on all the arid climate succulents that get pitched as great terrarium specimens. That said, there are genetically tiny species of aroids, other popular indoor plant groups, that are well suited to permanently small gardens under glass.

You might not be selling as many itty-bitty houseplants for fairy gardens anymore, but you could be selling more of them as specialty collector specimens or ingredients for stylish mini bios-spheres or truly tiny terrariums. Same goes for some of the containers or decorative items you marketed for fairy gardens.

Big returns

If you are worried about small sales and small margins on small plants, know that perception of value for these less common plant varieties is high. Just because a plant is itty bitty, does not mean it comes with a tiny price tag. I can assure you, all the tiny plants in my collection cost just as much, if not more, than most of my standard houseplants. Not to mention, tiny handmade pottery is also having a high-priced heyday. Similarly, I never expect to pay less for seeds or transplants of mini-vegetable or fruit varieties. Also, shipping tiny plants is much easier; this category of plants and products may open online sales and direct shipping opportunities for your garden center.

Size, and value, are after all in the eye of the beholder.