Fruit Tree Letterpress Greeting Card

This greeting card was made on a letterpress which gives it a lovely tactile feeling of ridges and impressions. It would also look smashing framed on a wall.

The image is taken from William Lawson’s 1618 ‘A New Orchard and Garden’, currently held in the University of Glasgow special collection. Gardening had become a national passion by the Seventeeth Century. Then, as now, it was a recreation that brought peace and contentment, and a welcome escape from the trials of a turbulent age. For Lawson, working in the orchard and garden was the ideal kind of rest and relaxation: “For whereas every other pleasure commonly fills some one of our senses, and that only, with delight, this makes all our senses swim in pleasure, and that with infinite variety joyned with no lesse commodity”.