Thursday, 7 August 2008

Wild flowers, playing cards and rain

Britain is famous for its wet summers, so if you go away for a holiday to an English seaside town or the countryside it is a good idea to take a pack of playing cards to pass the time if it rains.

That is advice I failed to take into account when I went away for a long weekend recently.

Wandering around the indoor visitor centre and gift shop at a country park, hoping the rain would ease enough for my partner and I to go on the walk we had planned, I spotted a lovely pack of playing cards illustrated with wild flowers.

The deck is called The Famous Wild Flowers Playing Cards, and each card has a different flower on it, with English and Latin names. Not only are the pictures lovely and would make any card game a bit more interesting to play, they should be a good way of learning to recognise common plants.

The deck is one of a series produced by Heritage Playing Card Company. Other titles I'm going to look out for include The Famous Herbs, Trees and Mushrooms.

After a couple of games of Cribbage over a beer in the pub, the rain stopped and my partner and I managed to get out on our walk - I even recognised a couple of the flowers from my deck of cards growing along the way.
If the storm had gone on much longer I might even have had time to devise some sort of divination system with the deck, using the flowers' magical and herbal associations.

Links:
www.heritageplayingcards.com/

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