Who hasn’t had a few garden fairies get inside their house?
It happens, and depending on whether or not you accept garden fairies in the house as just part of the whole gardening experience, it can be a good thing or a bad thing.
Three Ways Garden Fairies Get Inside your House
One of the most common ways garden fairies can get inside your house is through cut flowers. Garden fairies often sleep inside flower buds. Once that flower bud has been cut and put in a vase, it gradually opens, which causes the garden fairies to wake up and find themselves indoors. So, if you regularly cut flowers while still in the bud to use indoors, you are likely bringing in garden fairies, too.
A second method garden fairies use to get inside a house is to hitch a ride in the spine of a gardening book. This method is used by only the most patient of garden fairies because they don’t know if it will be hours, days, months, or even years before someone pulls that book off the shelf and opens it, allowing them to escape and have free reign of the house.
One other method garden fairies use to get into your house is to sneak into the gardener’s pocket and thus hitch a ride right over the threshold. This is one of the easiest methods and the one most often used by garden fairies making their first trip indoors.
Rarely do garden fairies just enter a house on their own through an open door or window.
Three Ways Garden Fairies Leave Your House
Garden fairies have several methods for leaving a house.
They may leave on those same cut flowers you brought inside, which is why it is important to take old, wilted cut flowers out to the compost bin. If you put them in the trash, well, no one wants that to happen to a garden fairy.
Another one of their methods for leaving is to hide out in a book spine. Again, this is only for the most patient of garden fairies because they have no idea when that book will leave your house. Often they will check to see if it is a library book, which more or less guarantees the book is leaving your house sooner rather than later. But then there’s no telling when that book will be checked out from the library again and who will check it out. For that reason, leaving through books isn’t their preference because it doesn’t take them outside, it just takes them to another house.
The most common way for garden fairies to leave your house is to hide in the tips of your gardening gloves or the toes of your gardening shoes which are usually just inside by a door. But there are risks with this method. Glove and shoe tips are tight quarters, especially once you put them on. Plus, this method can be a futile effort for the garden fairies to gain their freedom outdoors if you never take your gloves or shoes off outside.
So do a garden fairy a favor. Shake out your garden gloves and leave your shoes just outside the door for a tiny bit, then turn your head to give that garden fairy a bit of privacy. Often those few seconds are all they need to escape and go on their merry way, back out to the garden in search of a nice flower bud to nap in.
Do Garden Fairies Want to Be Inside?
Now that we know how garden fairies can get inside, and how they can get back out, we need to ask the question, “Do they want to be inside?”
They answer is generally no. Garden fairies prefer to be outside, but they are curious and do like to explore indoors, especially during the wintertime. For this reason, all gardeners should keep a few houseplants. Garden fairies can and often do spend winters indoors on houseplants. Some will even reside in Christmas trees, but only if the tree is real.
What Do Garden Faires Do Indoors?
We are still studying what garden fairies can do once they are indoors in a house. Though we have no proof, there are several things we think they are responsible for causing.
Cold Toast
They often will hang around the toaster to prevent it from making any sound when the toast is done. Then by the time you remember you actually made toast, it is stone cold. They love doing this.
Missing Socks
It goes without saying if you wash two matching socks and end up with one sock, the garden fairies took the other one. We don’t know yet what they do with those socks.
Missing Lids
Ditto lids. If you have a favorite storage container with a lid, as soon as you accidentally separate the lid from the container, the garden fairies will take off with the lid. Then to mix things up a bit, they will sometimes take the container and leave the lid.
Books
Some garden fairies specialize in books. They will move bookmarks in books, cause a book to fall open to the exact page they want you to read, or move the book to another shelf so you have trouble finding it.
This is by no means a complete list of what garden fairies like to do indoors. We are still adding to it as we learn more about garden fairy activity indoors.
Relax and Enjoy Their Company
We hope this information has been helpful for those who have garden fairies in their gardens to understand how they get indoors, what they can do once inside, and how they can leave. Knowing all of this, you can relax and enjoy their company. Garden fairies rarely cause any real problems indoors, unless those were your favorite socks. They can often help make a house a home, just as they make a plot of land a garden.