Imagine Gardens Diorama

    The theme is "Imagine Gardens" with a Victorian style train station being turned into a tourist center for the garden. We are still working on the station. There is a cherry orchard with beehives, fishponds and rivers soon to be mountains, hills and farms and hopefully a second tier for a European style village.

    Building is dimensional cardboard construction of Monet's home in Giverny. It just happened to fit our N gauge figures. It is glued to a Styrofoam base, which I painted green, then added a real stone pathway, an upturned bottle cap fishpond and dried and painted (pink and lavender) sedum blossoms for trees, flowers and shrubs.

    HO gauge platform transformed into an arbor with patio area with a flower stall and planned food service area. Booths and tabletops are balsa wood. Bench seats, tabletops and arbor are all matchsticks from spent fireplace matches. The HO gauge waiting bench is not a plant stand holding bits of match sticks painted then glued and rolled into 'flower bases.' the lavender vines are plastic flower bits.

    Steam Era Ladies with their coat sleeves, neckline and skirt painted white to appear summery. The coat shawls were painted pastels and the bonnets to look like a spring/summer wrap.

    I bought three plastic buildings at a second hand shop. The one with some landscaping was repainted to resemble stucco and the end had small gravel glued all of the way up, a foam board chimney covered with gravel and an awning plus 'stone' walls on each side of the entry plus a bench...later on flower beds and apple trees were added.