Old postcards Flower collections

Flower collections is a section about bouquets rather than botany. Almost every card here carries the same caption, Flower arrangement (Композиция из цветов): it names neither the plants nor an occasion, so the arrangement itself is the subject.

The section runs from 1967 to 1991. The earliest card is titled, fittingly, Flower collections (1967), followed by Flowers (1971) and the earliest Flower arrangement card, from 1973. Most were printed in 1981–1985, with 1984 the most frequent year. The latest is Carnations, 1991, printed in the final year of the USSR, which was formally dissolved on 26 December 1991.

A few captions stand out from the uniform series. Bouquet of dried plants (1975) belongs to the dried, or winter, bouquet tradition: arrangements made from dried flower heads, leaves and twigs. On a 1984 card the caption Photo composition states outright that the image is a staged photograph.

Because the captions barely change, these Soviet postcards make it easy to compare how the flower card evolved from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Every card in the section was scanned from a genuine copy.