When a Gardener Goes to a Postcard Show

When a gardener goes to a vintage postcard show, what does she look for?

Of course, she looks for postcards featuring her favorite flowers, the pansies and violas! Otherwise, the show can be quite overwhelming as there are tables and tables filled with box after box of vintage postcards. But finding those special pansy and violet cards was not that easy because postcard vendors don’t think like gardeners and categorize cards by plant types.

I know. Shocking!

Instead the vendors choose categories like states and cities, because apparently a vast number of cards feature places in cities and states. Or they group the cards by the type of greetings on them, including birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, even Halloween.

I got all excited at one vendor’s booth because I saw that they had a category called “Plants.” “Here are my people,” I thought to myself. But as you might have guessed, those postcards did not feature plants. They featured factory buildings!

But somehow, even though the vendors weren’t thinking like gardeners and categorizing cards “properly”‘ by types of plants featured, I managed to find seven more cards to add to my mini collection of postcards featuring pansies or violets. In fact, I managed to over double the size of my collection, going from six cards to 13 cards.

Oddly, all of the other six cards I had with pansies or violets were horizontal pictures, except for one. The seven new-to-me cards I picked up at this show were all vertical images. What are the odds?

Anyway, when a gardener goes to a vintage postcard show, she buys card with pansies and violets on them.

What would you have bought?

By the way, I’ve written several other “when a gardener” posts through the years. For example when a gardener reads a newspaper, featured the other time I confused Plants with Factories. Sigh. I also wrote about when a gardener goes to the movies, which could use a refresh since more gardening related movies have come out since then. And more timely, I wrote about when a gardener plans a halloween party, which might be a helpful post to read if you are planning such a party now. (Though there are a few images missing from when I migrated everything over from Blogger to my own website, but it is still contains some useful information!

If you’d like to read other “when a gardener” articles, there are over two dozen of them. Just follow that link.

Or tell me about the time you were thinking like a gardener, and realized no one else was!