The Making of Garden Pixie Stories

Every year, just before the spring flowers begin to appear in Newburgh, Indiana, where Susan and I live, the Garden Pixies arrive from their winter vacation in some warmer part of the Country. You may not know about Garden Pixies, but I'm sure there are many in your neighborhood. They're just very hard to see.

I discovered them by accident. I was taking pictures of tulips that were beginning to open in our garden. A breeze was making the flowers sway back and forth. I was afraid that they would be blurred in the photos, so I made an adjustment on the camera to make it take pictures more quickly. Then I took several pictures.

When I examined the pictures, the flowers looked clear and sharp, but there was a surprise in one picture. A mysterious blurry shape was next to one of the tulips. I couldn't see what it was. Maybe a hummingbird had flown by just as I snapped the picture. I adjusted my camera to take pictures even more quickly and shot some more.

There were only flowers in the first three pictures, but in the fourth I received a big surprise. The blurred shape was no longer blurry, and it wasn't a humingbird. It was a pixie, and she appeared to be painting the flower!

I took many more pictures and discovered lots of pixies in our garden. They all seemed to be busy adding colors to our flowers. Could pixies be painting all of the flowers?

In some pictures the pixies appeared to be talking to each other. I couldn't hear them, but I wondered if I could with a microphone and a recorder of some kind. I still couldn't see them when I looked around, so I held the microphone near different flowers, hoping that I would just happen to catch the voices of one or two.

When I played back my recordings, I heard tiny voices speaking very quickly. If those were the pixies talking, I would have to play the tape at a different speed in order to hear them. I borrowed a better recorder from a friend and tried again. Like with the camera, I had to keep adjusting the recorder to find the best speed. When I finally did, I was amazed by what I heard.

I began to take pictures and make recordings at the same time to learn all I could about the pixies. The recordings are very hard to hear clearly, but I made plenty of notes and I have a huge collection of pictures. So I think the best way to tell you about them is to show you photographs and tell you stories about them.

There are four stories for you to enjoy, one for each season. Click on the images below to read them.

The Terrible-Tempered ice Dragon attacks the garden in Winter. April and her pet, Bugpuppy, have an adventure when the time comes for The Spring Flower Show. In the Summer, Red Wrinkler and his Rowdy Cousins introduce a little too much play into their work. When Fall comes, Two Brave Pixies discover they'd rather be doing something else.

I hope you enjoy them all. I also hope you will watch carefully in your own garden. Perhaps you will see these industrious pixies at work.