The Flower Garden is an old
patience
or forbearance, is the ability to endure difficult or undesired long-term circumstances. Patience involves perseverance or tolerance in the face of delay, provocation, or stress without responding negatively, such as reacting with disrespect ...
or
card solitaire
Patience (Europe), card solitaire, or solitaire (US/Canada), is a genre of card games whose common feature is that the aim is to arrange the cards in some systematic order or, in a few cases, to pair them off in order to discard them. Most are in ...
using a single deck of 52
playing card
A playing card is a piece of specially prepared card stock, heavy paper, thin cardboard, plastic-coated paper, cotton-paper blend, or thin plastic that is marked with distinguishing motifs. Often the front (face) and back of each card has a f ...
s, and is based on an old Japanese game. It was first called Le Parterre, but is also known under the names The Bouquet and The Garden. The terms used in this game are related to
gardening
Gardening is the process of growing plants for their vegetables, fruits, flowers, herbs, and appearances within a designated space. Gardens fulfill a wide assortment of purposes, notably the production of Aesthetics, aesthetically pleasing area ...
. Some skill is needed to successfully complete the game, and skilful players can win more than 20% of the time.
Rules
Thirty-six cards are dealt in to six columns, each containing six cards. The columns are called the "
flower
Flowers, also known as blooms and blossoms, are the reproductive structures of flowering plants ( angiosperms). Typically, they are structured in four circular levels, called whorls, around the end of a stalk. These whorls include: calyx, m ...
beds" and the entire tableau is sometimes called "the
garden
A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is ''control''. The garden can incorporate bot ...
." The sixteen leftover cards become the reserve, or "the
bouquet." Some sources instead refer to this reserve as the "seeds", and the built-up foundations as the "bouquets".
["Flower Garden" (p.138) in ''The Playing Card Kit'' by Richard Craze, Simon & Schuster, 1995. ]
The top cards of each flower-bed and all of the cards in the bouquet are available for play. Cards can only be moved one at a time and can be built either on the foundations or on the other flower beds. The foundations are built up by suit, from Ace to King (a general idea of the game is to release the aces first). The cards in the garden, on the other hand, can be built down regardless of suit and any empty flower bed can be filled with any card. The cards in the bouquet can be used to aid in building, be put into the foundations, or fill an empty flower bed.
The game is won when all cards end up in the foundations.
Variations
An slightly easier variant of Flower Garden uses a tableau with seven columns of only five cards each, and a reserve of 17 cards.
Other variations include Wildflower (allows sequences to be moved), Brigade, and
Stonewall.
See also
*
Stonewall
*
List of patiences and solitaires
This is a list of patiences, which are card games that are also referred to as solitaires or as card solitaire.
This list is not intended to be exhaustive, but only includes games that have met the usual Wikipedia requirements (e.g. notability ...
*
Glossary of patience and solitaire terms
Games of patience, or (card) solitaires as they are usually called in North America, have their own 'language' of specialised terms such as "building down", "packing", "foundations", "talon" and "tableau". Once learnt they are helpful in de ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Flower Garden (Solitaire)
Open packers
Single-deck patience card games
Flowers in culture