Tap into your inner bliss and capture the intimate essence of nature by creating your very own miniature succulent zen garden. One of my resolutions for this year has been to make more time for self-love and self-care. So far, I’ve fallen in love with my home yoga practice, enjoyed long soaks in a hot bath, and have found myself eager to reconnect with nature through gardening.
Gardening is something that can be done anytime of year, no matter where you live! I don’t mean digging holes in the snow to plant lettuce, but instead looking at indoor plant projects that can be done no matter what the weather is like. As I looked out my window to see the sun shining, I got the urge to get in some gardening. But then by the time I got my boots on to play outside, the wind was biting and the rain was pouring. Ah, the Pacific Northwest is so unpredictable. To avoid getting drenched outside, I decided to work on a simple gardening project indoors while watching the crazy weather from my living room window.
I remember my mom having a desktop zen garden when I was little and loved playing with the tiny rake in the sand. With that in mind, I gathered up a few supplies and made my very own succulent zen garden that feeds my need for nature and tranquility, along with a healthy dose of nostalgia.
Materials:
- Shallow, decorative bowl
- Small succulent
- Sand (2 colors)
- Small paper cup
- Small rocks (for decoration)
- Chopstick or other ‘drawing’ tool
Make it!
Choose an indoor succulent for this project that will grow slowly and maintain a tidy shape. Haworthia, Gasteraloes, and Crassula, do well, as will a cactus. On the other hand, rosette-shaped succulents like Aeonium and Echeveria will quickly grow tall and spindly trying to get more sun. Learn more about growing and caring for succulents in the Essential Guide to Succulents.
Transfer your small succulent plant to a paper cup. I had to trim my cup to be slightly shorter so that the plant wouldn’t stick out too much from where I wanted to place it in the bowl.
Add some sand to the bottom of the bowl and nestle your plant into place.
Then fill the bowl up with sand.
Once the bowl is full, you can then choose the second color sand to fill in around your plant. I personally love the look of the black and white sand I chose to use and like the moon shape it created when I added the white sand around the succulent only.
Add a few natural rocks for decoration around your succulent and then use a chopstick or other ‘drawing’ tool to doodle a design into the sand.
Ta da!
Much like coloring, I find drawing simple designs in the sand to be quite a calming activity and I can now look forward to enjoying my miniature succulent zen garden every day!
See more modern indoor plant projects you can make all year!
Thank you for this post!!!! I was going through a self renovation process a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I wanted to clean the house and re decorate, we wanted to transform the bathroom into a spa to completely enjoy the light and all the beautiful features that the room has but we had such a chaos there! we had to take everything out to start to check what was worth to keep and what has to go away, it was hard at the very first start because some things had some emotional value, but at the end totally worth it, having your space clear, it feels like if you can be free, I love to have our new bathroom as it is now and I feel we are enjoying it much more, is hard to make some changes no matter how little they are, but is necessary and most of the time completely worth it, this idea is really good I’m definetly going to apply it into my new designs into my hbouse, so thank you for the advises!!
What a cute little idea! I’m definitely going to make a lovely little Zen garden! We’re going into winter here in the Southern Hemisphere, so one of these little gardens would be a fun project for winter. And something to play with – raking new patterns in the sand – on a chilly day! Just lovely!
How do you water the succulent
This is going to be my new therapy. I’ve been depressed for 3 years after differing a stroke aftervmy open heart surgery that left me with residual peripheral blindness left eye; had to retire my 36 year nursing career and have been lost since. I think this will be good to fill my time plus the need to. Nurture that we nurse’s have. Thanks for the great ideas!