POST FALLS — On the Post Falls prairie, a peaceful, plush property belongs to David and Linda Gibson.

On this land are happy farm animals and a grand garden where various vegetables and fragrant flowers grow.

Within one of the garden's many raised beds is a unique garden, and within that garden, an even smaller garden.

Although they can't be seen by the naked eye, this garden is for the fairies.

A tiny swing dangles from a tiny tree, a miniature birdcage hangs from a miniature branch and a fairy-sized vegetable garden is filled with little carrots, cabbage, beets and cauliflower that Linda fashioned out of clay.

"I used a toothbrush to make the little ripples in the cauliflower," Linda said Thursday morning, standing in the May sunshine in her backyard. "I just had fun with it."

Linda's fairy garden is a place where the imagination takes flight. Dwarf conifers, a corkscrew willow, dusty miller, fern asparagus and wispy grasses give the effect of a wooded wonderland where fairies might live. The plants are distributed among little lichen-covered boulders, bits of wood and other natural items.

"The fairies have lots of places to hide if they want," Linda said. "They can get into this old piece of wood, they have this cave, they have the bridge they can go across. They have a lot of places that fairies could potentially be."

She used an old, gray cherry stump to serve as the fairy "house," which already had a small crevice that could serve as an "entrance."

"I love the fact that they’ve got this little area where they can walk into their house," she said, bending down to show the natural opening in the stump. "I can almost envision a little stairway up there."

Although fairies have yet to make an appearance, the idea of making a small-scale, fairy-sized garden is a fun hobby for Linda, who is 6-feet-3-inches tall.

"I love the scale," she said. "I love how tiny they are and how surprising they can be. I personally like to look and find things that others don’t see, perhaps, so I love the fact that you can walk around and see all the tiny little things. Plus, I’m a big girl, and so for me to do something small is kind of refreshing. I have a lot of height and a lot of different characters in my garden, so it’s really nice to go from the great big things down to the little bitty tinies."

Linda said she found some cool ideas for fairy gardens on Pinterest and about six weeks ago, she and a friend decided to put one together. They found stones, twigs, sticks and other things on Linda's property to decorate the space. Linda also used some smaller plants she had and added dwarf plants she found at Aspen Nursery.

The fairy garden is contained in a 6-foot-by-10-foot bed and continues to be a work in progress.

"I think she’s awesome," said Linda's husband, David, who owns the professional lawn service Ultra-Lawn in Post Falls. "It’s kind of funny because I tell her how great it is, but of course, I’m her husband, so it doesn’t pull a lot of weight, but you have to realize I probably go into 600, 700 yards a year in our business, so we see what’s cool and what’s not. It’s very neat. Of course when she told me about it, I thought, ‘That just sounds like more work.'"

For Linda, it is a little bit of work, but it's work she enjoys. As a busy mom who works as Ultra-Lawn's CFO and volunteers in the community, having a garden and now a whimsical fairy garden is relaxing.

"My grandmother would turn over if she knew that I was wasting garden space to have a fairy garden," she said, smiling. "It’s not something that I would have done normally, but because I had extra space, I thought, ‘You know, it’d be really nice to do something different.’ I saw this and I thought, ‘What the heck?'"

She said fairy gardens are flexible and people can "make it as kitschy and as kid-friendly as they wanted it to be, or as natural and as rustic and beautiful as they want, too." Hers was fairly inexpensive because she was able to repurpose most of the items she used. She said the only cost was the new dwarf plants.

"Go to the nursery and look around," she said. "Any tiny little leaf, anything that speaks to you that’s just fairy-sized, use it, and if you don’t like it after a while, move it and put it somewhere else."