How to Make a Cardboard Box Summer Garden

Safety note: Cardboard can be hard to cut and scissors can be sharp, to be safe adult supervision may be required.

Make sure that the two long parts of the bottom of your box are showing from the inside, this will give a nice flat and even surface to decorate inside your box. Use tape to secure the base of your cardboard box so it looks like the picture shown.

Put some glue on the folded parts of the supports. One folded piece will be stuck to the sign and the other to the cardboard box. Use tape to secure everything while the glue dries. The sign and the support pieces together will look like this.

Your box is now ready to decorate.

Using the light blue paint, paint the inside of your box. You will need to paint the two sides, the back, the top and the sign blue to create the sky. Allow to dry.

On some green card draw the outline of some grass shapes and cut out enough pieces of card to cover the bottom and sides of your box. If you prefer, instead of cutting grass out of your card, why not cut “Hill” shapes; hills will be easier and quicker to cut. Once you've cut your pieces, glue them inside your box.

Take the dark green plush foam sheets and lay on the base of your garden. Use scissors to trim the sheets down that need to be cut to fit. You will be covering the whole base of the garden. Glue the pieces down and leave everything to dry.

Take the three tall tubes and put glue along the sides and hold together to form the trunk. Use an elastic band to hold them in place as they dry.

Your tree trunk will look like this.

First of all, with the brown card cut out three branch shapes. Small, medium and large works well.

Using the remaining leaves glue them together to form a chain. You will need to make three different lengths e.g. some five leaves, four leaves and three leaves long.

They will look like this.

Take your tree trunk and glue to the back of the box so the branches and the trunk look like one whole tree.

Allow to dry.

Keep sticking chains of leaves to the top of the box in semi circle layers, using all the longest chains then the middle size and finishing with the shortest until your tree looks like this.

Using the foam letters spell out and stick 'My Garden' across the top of the sign on your box. You could even use the letters to spell out your name to make it personal to you!

Add some garden wildlife! You can make caterpillars from pom poms, a painted rock ladybird or a pipe cleaner dragonfly! You could even make a different creepy crawly every day!