Floral Philately

I've loved flowers for as long as I can remember. As a kid, I also had fun paging through my uncle's stamp albums, and my favorites were always the ones with gorgeous blooms, usually from countries whose names I could barely pronounce. Little did I know that years later, I would be working with the renowned British philatelist Stephen Osborne!

During those years, I handled probably millions of stamps and continued to be fascinated by the floral ones. Did you know that the U.S. Postal Service alone has issued over 100 postage stamps with different featured flowers?

The famous 'Love" stamp, issued in 1982 is a classic. That same year, the Postal Service also issued the State Birds and Flowers stamps, for all of the 50 states.



You can design your own valid postage stamp on Zazzle.com. Here's one I found there recently, designed especially for someone's birthday. What a lovely way to celebrate an event!



Great idea: design your own stamp for mailing out your wedding invitations.



The British Red Poppies stamp, interesting because of it's use of barbed wire rather than stem, was voted the most popular stamp of 2006 In Great Britain. Note that Queen Elizabeth's image is always somewhere on the stamp.

Thailand's stamp for 2009 is this gorgeous white rose, stunning in its simplicity.

A flower can be found in even the smallest of unexpected spaces!