Stroll through Disney gardens fuels ideas for home

Nobody does it like Disney Horticulture, and it made speaking at the Epcot International Flower and Garden Festival in Orlando, Fla., a pure joy. In between lectures, my travels around the parks left me awed at Disney magic and the Imagineers' brilliant gardening ideas for the "happiest place on Earth."

Nestled into the charming plants of the Epcot butterfly fairy garden was a lovely creation that turned an old teapot into a miniature fairy house. The teapot was painted white and decorated with charming little twigs and mosses, dried pomegranates and silk flowers. It's small enough to move around, so you could try a new location every year for a new garden and color scheme of seasonal flowers.

Also in that butterfly-garden composition was a beautiful moss sphere about the size of a basketball. It was set upon a standard or stem about waist-high. The gardeners planted it with the flat bronze-leaf groundcover, Ajuga reptans. Mixed in with the Ajuga is amethyst-blue lobelia, a common garden annual flower known for its fine texture and tendency to cascade. To bring even more pizazz, they added vivid coral silk butterflies all over the outside, creating an eye-popping blend of light and dark hues. It made me think how wonderful it would be to add silk butterflies to any of our porch or patio plants, or to re-create this simple yet effective composition for my own garden.

Mickey and Minnie's vegetable garden featured neat little chicken-wire tubes that can easily be made with some leftover fencing. They are used for the delicious snow peas and their newer cousins, sugar snap peas. To copy, just roll chicken wire into a 2- to 3-foot-tall tube about 4 to 6 inches in diameter. Set them down upon each young dwarf snow- or snap-pea plant, and stake into place. The seedlings climb up the inside, sending its flowers out through the wire where the peas mature for easy picking.

For a drought-resistant sustainable garden, the Disney gardeners came up with the idea of creating a Mediterranean or rustic look for an ordinary building. Over a windowlike opening, they took a strip of woven willow twig fence to create an awning using cables and turnbuckles. With a west-facing exposure, this prevents the sun from heating the window to blistering hot temperatures that radiate into the room inside. Use reed fencing to re-create this at home, or better yet, recycle a broken roll-up matchstick blind. What a charming and practical way to solve problems with a European alfresco look.

Though I have heard of "Buddha's belly bamboo," I have never seen it exhibit the characteristic that gives it such a unique name. Known as Bambusa ventricosa, the nodes of its stems tend to bulge when stressed by pot-bound roots or drought. Though the plant in the center of the Chinese display at Epcot was in-ground, it must have been carefully cultivated to reach this degree of beauty. Certainly, this would make an outstanding candidate for interesting container specimens.

Disney gardeners also created hanging planters using woven fiber bags that held many bulk products such as rice or animal feed. Because the woven plastic "fabric"doesn't decompose when wet, water drains out through every surface, reducing the chance of overwatering. Sew these ingenious planters on an ordinary machine, and create your own hanging Garden of Eden.

Even though Disney is a world of fun and fantasy, for many of us, it is a place where some of the most creative minds come together. And when Disney Horticulture meets the Imagineers, we gardeners reap an enormous harvest of magical ideas.

Maureen Gilmer is a horticulturist. Her blog, the MoZone, offers ideas for cash-strapped families. Read the blog at www.MoPlants.com/blog. E-mail her at mogilmer@yahoo.com.