Flower Garden Solitaire: pick from the bouquet, tend the flower beds

Flower Garden is one of the prettiest-named patience games, and it plays as nicely as it sounds. Every card is face up from the start. Six "flower beds" of cards run across the table, and below them sits a "bouquet" of sixteen loose cards you can pick from in any order. There is no stock to turn and nothing hidden: the whole game is about choosing well.

Here you will find the layout, the rules as they work on this site, some gardening tips (so to speak), and what we learned when we set a computer loose on two thousand deals.

The garden, laid out

• One pack of 52 cards, all face up.
• Six flower beds (columns) of six cards each, using 36 cards.
• The bouquet: the other 16 cards, spread out where you can see them all.
• Four foundations, one for each suit, built from Ace to King.

How to play Flower Garden

Getting the whole garden home

Move all 52 cards to the foundations, each suit in order from Ace up to King.

The flower beds

• Only the bottom card of each bed can be moved.
• A card may be placed on a card one rank higher, in any suit. A 6 of anything goes on a 7 of anything.
• Cards move one at a time. You cannot lift a run in one go.
• Any card may go into an empty bed.

The bouquet

• Any card in the bouquet can be played at any time, onto a bed or a foundation.

There is no stock, no waste and no redeal. Everything you need is on the table from the first moment.

Why Flower Garden is a game of choices

Building "down in any suit" makes Flower Garden very flexible: a 9 can take any of four 8s. And being able to take any card from the bouquet gives you a free choice most patience games never offer. But freedom comes with a catch. Because cards only move one at a time, a long jumble in a flower bed is slow to take apart, and every bouquet card you use up is one less option later.

That mix of freedom and slow digging is why the game rewards looking ahead. It is also why the bouquet is best treated as a reserve, not a quick fix.

Gardening tips

Read the whole garden first

Every card is visible, so spend a minute looking before you move. Where are the Aces and 2s? Which bed has a low card buried near the top? In our deals an average of 1.26 of the four Aces started in the bouquet, where you can play them straight away.

Treat the bouquet as savings

It is tempting to spend bouquet cards freely. Instead, use them when they unlock something important in a bed, such as a card that frees a buried Ace or lets you empty a column.

Make the most of a bare flower bed

An empty bed can take any card, which makes it the most useful space on the table. Use it to hold a card while you dig out the one beneath, rather than filling it with the first card that comes along.

Plant short rows, not long ones

Since you can only move one card at a time, a long run is hard to shift. Build where it helps the foundations, not just because a card fits.

Watch for foundation traps

Any-suit building means a card can serve as a landing spot for four different cards. Send a card to the foundation only when you are sure none of the cards one rank lower still need it.

How often can a Flower Garden be won?

Because every card is on show, we used a solver: a program that sees exactly what you see and searches for a winning line. We gave it a fixed amount of searching per deal and ran it on 2,000 numbered deals.

This one needs honest reading. Flower Garden turned out to be a hard game for a computer to finish searching, so more than half the deals were left undecided. What we can say is that somewhere between 43.3% and 94.7% of deals are winnable, and only about one in twenty is proven impossible. The true figure lies inside that wide band; we have not narrowed it down yet.

One thing we did check: does starting with Aces in the bouquet help? Barely. Deals with two or more Aces in the bouquet were solved 44.2% of the time, against 42.8% with none or one. Where the Aces start matters less than how you use the bouquet.

Flower Garden on solitaire-free.nz

Flower Garden is free on solitaire-free.nz. It plays in any modern browser on a computer, tablet or phone, with no download, no sign-up and no email needed. The cards are large and easy to read, with a zoom control for more size. Drag cards or tap to move them. Hint, unlimited Undo, Restart and Auto Play are available whenever you want them, and Undo is a gift in a game where one hasty bouquet card can matter later. Your wins, time and moves are tracked, and you can mute the sound, go fullscreen and choose a table colour.

Where our numbers come from, one step at a time

This study was run by the solitaire-free.nz team in September 2026, with the rules of Flower Garden as played on this page.

1. Reading the rules in the game code. Six beds of six, a sixteen-card bouquet with any card playable, all cards face up, building down in any suit, one card at a time, any card in an empty bed, and no stock.
2. Turning the rules into a program that only makes those moves.
3. Dealing 2,000 numbered games, each from a seed number so the same deals can be replayed.
4. Using a solver. With every card face up, a solver knows no more than you do. It searched up to 200,000 positions per deal.
5. Sorting every deal into solved, proven impossible or undecided.
6. Checking published research. We could find no published figure for Flower Garden, so there is nothing to compare against yet.
7. Working out margins of error as 95% ranges for each percentage.
8. Being upfront about limits. With more than half the deals undecided, this is the least precise result in our study. A longer search would narrow it.

The nuts and bolts

The simulation is written in Python 3.11, standard library only, in a module called flowergarden.py. It uses best-first search: the program keeps a list of positions ordered by how promising they look, always explores the best one next, and records every position it has seen so none is searched twice. Foundation moves are played automatically only when it is certain no lower card could need that card any more. A shared runner uses multiprocessing to spread deals over the computer's processor cores, and each deal is shuffled from its seed number. Percentages have Wilson score intervals as their 95% ranges.

An AI assistant, Claude from Anthropic, helped us write and review the code and draft this page. It did not supply any results. Every figure comes from running the simulation, and the team checked the wider study against published research before publishing.

By Admin, solitaire-free.nz. Study date: September 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Can I really play any card from the bouquet?

Yes. Every bouquet card is available at all times, in any order.

Can a run be lifted in one go here?

No. In Flower Garden cards move one at a time.

Do suits count in the flower beds?

Not in the flower beds: any card one rank lower may go on top. Suits only matter on the foundations.

Can every garden be cleared?

No, but most look promising. At least 43.3% of our deals were solved and only 5.4% were proven impossible; the rest we could not settle.

Which games share the Flower Garden feel?

If you like having every card on view, try FreeCell or Eight Off. You can see every game on our games page and find more reading on the blog.