The Floral Clock

in West Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh

1928

Date of the Postcard

Postcards

I'm still not certain about the year of this clock, despite having seen the Valentine postcard above and the J B White postcard below, both of the same clock.

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In fact, the second JB White card above has been hand-coloured, and the colours do not match those on the Valentine card.

Valentine's Numbering

The Valentine postcard shown at the top of this page is numbered 66187. This number would normally indicate that the photo was taken around 1910, but Valentine sometimes carried old numbers onto cards of the same subject that they published in later years.

In fact, the position is a little clearer because Valentine also produced a postcard in sepia using the same negative as above and gave it the number 202923.  This is within the range of negative numbers that they allocated to their photographs taken in 1927.

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At first, this suggested that the clock above may be the 1927 clock, but Valentine also published a postcard of the 192X clock with an earlier number in the 1927 range - 201431.  (There is a man's hat in front of the final digit of the year on this one.  So I have assumed that the 192X clock is the 1927 clock.)

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12 Large Flowers

Donald Beets, Letchworth, Hertford, England, who has done a lot of research into the floral clock, believes that the photo at the top of this page is of the 1928 clock.  (There is one further complication:  I believe that on one of Donald's earlier notes, he described the 1928 clock as having 12 large flowers around the edge of the clock.  This does not match the photo at the top of this page, so some further research could be done on this topic.)

Words

Donald tells me that 1927 was probably about the first year that the words appeared on the Floral Clock.  The words were 'TEMPUS FUGIT' -  Latin for 'TIME FLIES'.

Floral Clock

Background Notes

Floral Clock

Recollections

Floral Clock

Winter

Floral Clock

Each Year