Nothing is hidden

Flower Garden Solitaire

Six beds of six cards and a bouquet of sixteen you may play in any order you like. Every card in the deck is face up before your first move, so a deal that can be won can be worked out rather than stumbled into.

Six beds of six
A sixteen-card bouquet
Build down, any suit
Nothing hidden

Found0/52

Bouquet16

Garden36

Moves0

Foundations

Bouquet

Build foundations by suit and use the bouquet to open the flower beds.

A bouquet and six beds

Flower Garden Solitaire rules

Two rules do most of the work: the bouquet has no top card, and an empty bed takes anything.

Flower Garden Solitaire setup and rules
Setup
Deck	One standard 52-card deck, every card face up.
The garden	Six flower beds of six cards each — thirty-six cards.
The bouquet	The remaining sixteen cards, spread out beside the beds.
Foundations	Four, built up by suit from the ace.
What can move
From a bed	The exposed card only, one at a time.
From the bouquet	Any card in it, at any time. There is no top card.
Into the bouquet	Nothing. Cards leave it and never return.
Playable on move one	Twenty-two: six bed cards and all sixteen of the bouquet.
Building
On a bed	One rank lower than the exposed card. Suit is ignored.
Groups	Never. Cards move singly.
An empty bed	Accepts any card at all, from a bed or the bouquet.
To a foundation	Ace first, then up in suit.
Winning
Win condition	All 52 cards on the four foundations.
Losing	No legal move remains. There is no stock and no redeal.

Sixteen cards in hand

How to play Flower Garden Solitaire

Thirty-six cards go out as six flower beds of six. The sixteen left over are the bouquet, laid out beside them. Aces go up to the foundations and build in suit; the beds build downward by rank, and suit is ignored entirely.

The bouquet is not a stock and not a waste pile. It has no order and no top card: every one of its sixteen cards is available on every turn until you play it. Nothing can ever be put back into it, so it drains steadily through the game and the flexibility it gives you drains with it.

Empty a bed and it becomes a slot that will take any card in the deck. There is no stock to draw from and no redeal, so those two things — the bouquet and the empty beds — are the entire engine of the game.

What makes this one different

Every card is visible before you move

There is no face-down card anywhere in Flower Garden. Not in the beds, not in the bouquet, and there is no stock to turn over. From the first moment you can see all fifty-two cards and, with enough patience, work out whether the deal can be won and how.

That puts it in a small category with FreeCell and Baker's Dozen: games where losing is never bad luck in the moment, only a bad deal or a bad decision. It also means a lost deal is worth a second look, because the information needed to beat it was on the table the whole time.

Twenty-two of those fifty-two cards can be played on the very first move — the exposed card of each of the six beds, plus all sixteen bouquet cards. That is the widest opening of any game in this family, and it is why the game feels generous even though it gives you nothing to draw.

The bouquet is more than a third of your live cards. Six beds contribute one playable card each; the bouquet contributes all sixteen of its own. Spending bouquet cards carelessly does not just use up a card, it narrows the board faster than any other move available to you.

What the beds accept

What the beds and the bouquet allow

Legal and illegal Flower Garden moves
The move	Verdict	Why
A bed shows the 9♠. You play the 8♦ from the bouquet on to it.	Legal	One rank lower, and suit does not matter on the beds.
A bed shows the 9♠. You play the 8♦ from the bottom of another bed.	Illegal	Only the exposed card of a bed can move. Buried cards wait.
A bed shows the 9♠. You play the 10♥ on to it.	Illegal	Beds build downward only. There is no up-or-down rule here.
A bed is empty. You play the 7♣ into it.	Legal	An empty bed takes anything — the most valuable move in the game.
You move the 6♥ and the 5♠ under it across as a pair.	Illegal	No group moves. Six first, then five, and only if both fit.
You move a card from a bed back into the bouquet.	Illegal	The bouquet only ever shrinks.
Foundations show ♦ up to the 3. You play the 4♦ from the bouquet.	Legal	Bouquet cards reach the foundations directly.

Working the bouquet

Flower Garden Solitaire strategy

Pick a bed and commit to emptying it. Six-card beds do not clear by accident. Choose the one whose cards you can most easily place elsewhere and work it deliberately, rather than taking the best-looking move on each side of the garden in turn.

Treat bouquet cards as the payment for that plan. They are the cards that can go anywhere, so they are what you use to absorb the awkward ranks a bed throws up while you dig.

Do not rush the aces past their usefulness. Foundations are safe, but a low card on a bed can be the landing spot that lets you shift a two or a three. In an open game you can check whether it is needed before you bank it.

Plan several moves ahead, because you can. Nothing is hidden, so a sequence you can see working will work. This is one of the few games where sitting and reading the table beats playing quickly.

The strongest thing on the table

An empty bed is worth more than any card in it

An empty flower bed accepts any card in the deck, from a bed or from the bouquet. That makes it a universal parking space, and it is the only one the game offers. The first one you open typically decides whether the deal is winnable.

The mistake almost everyone makes is filling it immediately, because there is always some card that would be tidier somewhere else. Every card you park there costs you the slot until you can clear it again — and clearing a bed a second time is much harder than the first, because the bouquet has shrunk in the meantime. Open the bed, then leave it alone until it buys you something specific.

Three ways to spoil it

How a solvable garden gets ruined

Filling the first empty bed too quickly

An empty bed accepts any card in the deck, which makes it the single most powerful thing you can own here. Dropping a card into it to make one more move is almost always a bad trade — the bed stops being a universal slot the moment it holds anything. Empty it, then sit on it until you know precisely what it is for.

Spending bouquet cards as filler

Sixteen cards that can be played in any order is enormous flexibility, and it is strictly finite. Playing a bouquet card just because it fits somewhere turns a free choice into a fixed one. Keep bouquet cards for the moments a bed will not open any other way.

Burying a low card under a long descending run

Because beds build down in any suit, it is easy to assemble a tidy 9-8-7-6-5 on top of something you needed. Each of those cards has to come off individually before you can reach it, and every one needs its own destination. Tidy is not the same as useful.

Flower Garden's odds

Is Flower Garden Solitaire winnable?

A good proportion of deals are, and more than most players manage, because the losses come from decisions rather than from cards you could not see. The bouquet and the empty-bed rule together give you far more room than La Belle Lucie or Shamrocks ever do.

What makes it hard is that the room is finite and quietly spent. Sixteen bouquet cards feel limitless for the first twenty moves and then are not. We do not publish a win rate: it moves sharply with the reserve size, and versions exist with as few as twelve bouquet cards. This one deals sixteen.

This version

Sixteen in the bouquet, open beds, no stock

One deck: six beds of six cards, sixteen cards in the bouquet, all face up.
Every bouquet card is playable at any time; nothing may be returned to it.
Beds build down by rank with suits ignored, one card at a time.
An empty bed accepts any card.
Foundations build up in suit from the ace and never give cards back.
No stock, no redeal.

Undo is unlimited and unpenalised, with no timer or score. The game is also published as The Garden and, occasionally, as Bouquet.

Open beds compared

Flower Garden against the fan games

All four deal the whole deck face up with no stock. Flower Garden is the outlier on both of the columns that matter most — it is the only one with a reserve, and the only one where an empty space is worth anything.

Flower Garden compared with La Belle Lucie, Shamrocks, and Baker's Dozen
Game	Reserve	Empty space	Tableau building	Playable at start
Flower Garden	16 cards, all available at once	Take any card	Down, any suit	22
La Belle Lucie	None	Dead forever	Down in suit	18
Shamrocks	None	Dead forever	Up or down, any suit	18
Baker's Dozen	None	Dead forever	Down, any suit	13

Baker's Dozen is the closest in building rule — down by rank, any suit — and shows what Flower Garden would be without its two gifts: thirteen columns, no reserve, and an empty column that does nothing.

Explore

More solitaire games

The fan games this one is usually shelved beside, and the closest match on building rule.