Ever wandered into a tucked-away part of a garden, somewhere a bit less tended, where the child in you whispers, ‘this is where the fairies live’? Or have you ever wondered what was missing from your lovely manicured landscape? The answer is a wilder pocket of garden. And that’s because these spaces push different buttons and they’re very good at making smaller gardens seem so much bigger. You don’t need acres to welcome a bit of fairyland into your garden, but what you do need when planting magical spaces is the ability to let things go a little. Loosen up your style and maintenance routine and let the plants take over. If you’re willing to follow their lead, the magic will follow. Here are some tips on how to create a magical garden:

Picking a secret space: start by finding a spot in the garden that you’ll be transforming. Ideally it should feel a long way from the door and out of sight of the windows. (It’s not a coincidence that the fairies always live at the bottom of the garden because they need places where they can quickly get out of sight.) If your options are limited, consider narrow garden corridors down the side of the building or tucked between the house and the garage.

Making fairy habitat: whether you believe in magic folk or not, to successfully make part of the garden feel magical you need to create a space where you can imagine a fairy could live. You need romantic plantings. You need flowers. You need bird, bee and butterfly attracting plants. You need water. Provide all this and you have a place where fairies could be surrounded by the type of flowers that give them their names – rose, magnolia, lavender and pansy – flowers that they use to dress themselves, winged creatures to share the garden breezes with and water in a dish to reflect their lovely faces in.

Getting practical: so look at the space you have and do the following. Pull up any wide straight paths and place stepping stones along a winding route. If there are any existing plants that have been well-trimmed or hedged, let them grow out into wilder, looser more romantic versions of themselves. Then plant the following: the Fairy Magnolia® series of magnolias will form a screen from the rest of the garden and cover itself in dancing fairy flowers in spring; romantic roses like Flower Carpet® roses add a romantic sleeping-beauty-vibe to the space; lavender attracts the bees and foxgloves for the nectar eating birds; pansies will turn their whiskered faces to whoever wanders down the path. Toss in seed between the gaps to see what thrives there – poppies, bachelor’s buttons, nasturtiums, columbine – and whatever you do, think before you trim anything. The idea is you want nature to take over and work alongside you in creating this wild space where magic might just happen.