These days, given our propensity to gravitate to the city centre and go for homes that sacrifice the traditional garden for quick access to all the action and city-living amenities, if you have any sort of space for a garden you can consider yourself to be very lucky. As a result of this backyard space being scarce, having a traditional garden is often enough of a nice alternative to “not having one at all.”
However, for those who have always had some sort of backyard garden space to work with, going the traditional route might start to become a bit stale, whether you’re moving into a new joint or if you just feel the need to make a change to your current garden. Instead, consider alternative design ideas for your backyard, from brick garages like you can see here to outdoor man caves.
Of the many alternative garden designs, one of the most interesting we’ve recently come across is that creating a mini-land. These interesting items are great to add extra things to enjoy from your outdoor garden furniture.
What is a backyard garden mini-land?
I’m pretty sure your best guess will lead you to the right answer, but just for clarity, a backyard garden mini-land is pretty much a domestic version of those model cities that cannot help but draw the attention of visitors or observers. You often find these maintained as specialist local attractions, some of which get really elaborate.
Garden miniature lands can be as simple as just featuring a couple of models of random buildings and landmarks, often found in iterations of mini-lands that offer some outdoor space to relax and have a picnic. Garden miniature lands can also be as sophisticated as housing scaled-down models of recognisable neighbourhoods, towns, cities, etc, with the models even replicating life as it plays out in the full-sized, real world.
So you might have a train system running through the mini-land, with some of the most interesting action-areas highlighted by the presence of the likes of outdoor garden furniture like teak wood park benches.
So bringing that into the context of a backyard, it becomes pretty clear that considerably more work will have to go into the construction and maintenance of a mini-land-themed garden.
Keeping it simple
Unless you’re taking this as a cue to get into modelling and landscaping at something like a hobbyist level, you should keep it as simple as possible with your backyard mini-land. You’d have to be a model train enthusiast to make sure everything is running technically, between all the work it takes to ensure your backyard garden looks like someone is actually keeping it.
The best approach would be to designate certain areas for the elements of the mini-land, much like how prominent towns and cities are punctuated by vast, green spaces in countries that have the luxury of space at their disposal. Installing PVC Post & Rail Fencing around the mini-garden area could be a great way to segregate lands if you are growing different kinds of plants, say, or want to keep your pets away from some of the greenery. It can also be like the finishing touch to the whole landscape and serve as a deterrent for any intruders as well.
Also, a general rule of thumb would be to keep that part of the garden which houses the mini-land models under some sort of cover from the elements, even if not completed covered up. For instance, if you do indeed have something like running train models, they should be stationed under the protection of the decking overnight, when not running…
