Gone to Pot: Gardener’s playing cards
‘Gone to Pot’: special playing cards for keen gardeners, United Kingdom.
This is one of the many packs of cards devoted to gardeners and gardening. Every card has on it a useful gardening tip – the goal being to learn garden tips whilst enjoying a game of cards. Each “tip” or piece of advice is written in green against the white card background. The “tips” on the Aces are in white against a green rectangular background. The jokers take the form of garden gnomes. The pack is undated, and was produced for H & A, York (Hall & Associates Marketing Ltd). See the box►
Above: ‘Gone to Pot’: Gardener’s playing cards produced for Hall & Associates Marketing Ltd, undated.
By Peter Burnett
Member since July 27, 2022
I graduated in Russian and East European Studies from Birmingham University in 1969. It was as an undergraduate in Moscow in 1968 that I stumbled upon my first 3 packs of “unusual” playing cards which fired my curiosity and thence my life-long interest. I began researching and collecting cards in the early 1970s, since when I’ve acquired over 3,330 packs of non-standard cards, mainly from North America, UK and Western Europe, and of course from Russia and the former communist countries.
Following my retirement from the Bodleian Library in Dec. 2007 I took up a new role as Head of Library Development at the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publications (INASP) to support library development in low-income countries. This work necessitated regular training visits to many sub-Saharan African countries and also further afield, to Vietnam, Nepal and Bangladesh – all of which provided rich opportunities to further expand my playing card collection.
Since 2019 I’ve been working part-time in the Bodleian Library where I’ve been cataloguing the bequest of the late Donald Welsh, founder of the English Playing Card Society.
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