Local Miniature Garden Company Going Strong

Beginning with bonsai trees in Japan, the tradition of miniature gardening, which is thousands of years old, is being carried on in Wayzata.
Designer Kathryn Swenson operates under the “gnome” de plume Gnomenclature, the company that provided a 39-piece miniature garden display for the opening of the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum’s Visitor Center last week.
The 20-foot by 15-foot display greets visitors as they enter the 45,000-square-foot visitor center. Combining vegetation with fantasy, it includes live bonsai and dwarf conifer trees, as well as fairies, a waterfall and a working train, all in 1:12-inch scale, the same scale as a typical doll house.
Swenson, the CEO of Gnomenclature, 236 Minnetonka Ave. S., and designer of its products, started her company about three years ago.
Swenson said she has always been an artist. For decades she worked as an interior and architectural designer. But she had also cultivated a passion for gardening during those years, and about eight years ago, she began creating miniature gardens at home. “The idea for miniatures just came to me,” she said.
She began with what she called a fairy garden at her home. Her passion for miniatures grew, until she started Gnomenclature, which now offers two lines of products.
Swenson’s first line features 1,200 different designs of fairies, cottages and little bridges. All of them are featured on the company’s Web site, www.thefairyshouse.com. Another line of 1,200 new designs will be available in March, Swenson said.
As she learned more about miniature gardening, she realized it has a long history and has also become very popular with a particular group of hobbyists. Railroad gardening, landscaping around a model railroad, is a culture she didn’t realize existed until its members started buying her creations, which officially went on the market four years ago.
Swenson was approached to do the arboretum project by Peter Olin, the arboretum’s director and a University of Minnesota professor in the horticulture department of the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Science. He had included her garden at her home on Lake Minnetonka in tours sponsored by the Arboretum.
And she created a wonderful exhibit to complement the opening of the visitor center, he said. Her assistant, Nancy Mason, put the exhibit together using her landscaping skills and Swenson’s creations. Olin said she spent a lot of time creating detail compelling enough for a woman he saw to get on her hands and knees to get a better photograph of the display.
For more information about the arboretum, call 952-443-1400. To contact Gnomenclature, call 952-929-9282.