You can create wonderful miniature gardens in large plant containers.  These gardens can have all the features that belong to a normal garden such as trees, shrubs and flowers.  You can create a miniature garden using plants that have been created to be dwarfs genetically or young plants.  You can also use regular plants whose growth has been slowed.

Young plants can serve your purposes for a miniature garden for only a short period of time.  Once they grow too big, you will have to transplant them to their own pot.  You also need to be sure to plant plants together that have similar needs.  If their needs are all different (one needing more water and one needing dry compost), they will not survive.

If you crowd the roots, the above ground part of the plant will remain small.  To slow growth, you will plant the plants only a few inches away from each other.  If you use little stainless steel woven baskets to put the plants in before planting them in the main container, their roots cannot spread out and grow, but they can still absorb water and nutrients.

Plants well-suited to this type of display are coleus (Coleus), English Ivy (hedera helix), many rubber tree species (Ficus), Hawaiian schefflera (Schefflera arboricold), aucuba (Aucuba), tiplant (Cordyline fruitcosa), croton (Codiaeum variegatum var. pictum) and various species of dracaena (Dracaena).  You can also purchase complete systems for cultivating miniature plants, with complete instructions, from garden centers.

Mini-plants are also in fashion.  Do you want a rose garden on your windowsill?  The cultivar “Colibri” will give you red flowers, “Baby Masquerade” is orange and “Dwarf Queen” and “Dwarf King” are pink.

Some plants that are offered as minis are the African violets, cyclamen, begonias, peace lillies (Spathiphyllum), poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima), impatiens (Impatiens), azaleas (Rhododendron), and a lot of leafy cacti varieties.  Don’t count on these to last forever, though.  In the nursery, these plants were quite often treated with a chemical that inhibited their growth.  Once in your hands, they will grow normally after a while.