Nginx, try_files & multiple folders with front controllers - php

Question

I can't wrap my head around Nginxs' try_files. Recently I installed Nginx in favour of Apache on my development machine. How I used to work was like this: I'd bootstrap a project in a subfolder of my http directory. If this involved laravel, wordpress, codeigniter or any other framework that's using a front controller to make URLs more readable, I'd add a .htaccess in that directory to rewrite all non-existing paths to index.php.
Supposedly, this is very simple on Nginx: try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string and it should work. However, all this does is redirect everything to the index.php in the $document_root. Example:
File structure:
http/clients/cms/public/index.php front controller
http/clients/cms/public/some/application/url request uri with the parameters some, application and url.
http/clients/cms/public/images/image.png a static file.
http/clients/blog/index.php another front controller
http/clients/blog/wp-content/image.png another static file
http/clients/blog/some-article-title a 'pretty url' that should be directed to 4
Now, hen a request is made to 2, try_files detects that /some, /some/application and /some/application/url don't exist. It will now redirect to /index.php. I would expect that it would redirect to index.php in the public/ directory, but it doesn't. Instead, it redirects to the index.php in the $document_root (which happens to contain a phpinfo(); call, so it's easy to see that it goes wrong..).
A solution would be to create multiple location blocks in my Nginx config, but I'm not liking that. It would add a significant amount of extra work to my bootstrapping process.
Is there a way to use try_files in the directories so that it works exactly like the apache alternative?
My config file:
server {
listen 80;
server_name localhost,imac.local;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;
rewrite_log on;
root /Volumes/Storage/Fabian/Dropbox/Sites;
index index.php index.html;
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
#echo $request_filename;
#break;
}
location ~ \.php$ {
fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
fastcgi_index index.php;
#fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
}
location ~ /\. {
deny all;
access_log off;
log_not_found off;
}
}
thanks!