Flower Garden Solitaire: a garden of open cards and a very hard question

Flower Garden deals every card face up. Thirty-six cards are planted in six "flower beds" of six, and the other sixteen make up the "bouquet", a spread of cards you are free to pick from in any order. Once the cards are down, nothing is hidden and nothing is left to chance. It sounds like a game that should be easy to judge. It turned out to leave our solver undecided more often than any other game's main test in our study.

Our solver played 2,000 deals with every card in view. It found a win in 43.3%, proved 5.35% impossible, and in the remaining 51.35% ran out of search before reaching a verdict. The truthful answer is therefore a band: at least 43.3% and at most 94.7% of Flower Garden deals are winnable. We would rather tell you that than pretend to a precision we do not have.

Flower Garden on the difficulty ladder

What the table really shows is that Flower Garden is a deep game. FreeCell, with the same "everything visible" design, gave our solver almost no trouble. Flower Garden, with single-card moves and a bouquet that is always open, left it with far more positions to explore, and that same depth is what makes it absorbing to play by hand.

Beds, bouquet and the rules of this garden

• Deck: one standard 52-card deck, every card face up.
• Beds (tableau): six columns of six cards.
• Bouquet: the other sixteen cards, spread out. You may play any of them at any time, onto a bed or a foundation.
• Foundations: four, one per suit, from Ace to King.
• Building in the beds: down by one rank, any suit: the 8 of hearts can go on any 9.
• Moving cards: one card at a time. Runs do not move as a block.
• Empty beds: any card can fill them.
• No stock and no redeal.

The Spider connection

Flower Garden builds exactly the way Spider does: any card on any card one rank higher, regardless of suit. The difference is what you are allowed to move. In Spider, same-suit runs move together; in Flower Garden, everything moves one card at a time. Spider players will recognize the building instinct straight away, and will need to unlearn the habit of thinking in blocks.

Reading a Flower Garden deal

Expect about one free Ace

Across our 2,000 deals, an average of 1.26 Aces turned up in the bouquet, playable straight away. The others were somewhere in the six beds.

But starting Aces barely matter

We split the deals by how many Aces began in the bouquet. With two or more, the solver won 44.2%; with none or one, 42.8%. That is a gap of under two points. A handful of free Aces does not decide a Flower Garden game. What decides it is how you use the bouquet in the middle game.

How to tend the garden

• Think of the bouquet as a reserve, not a to-do list. Every bouquet card is available forever, so there is no hurry to play one unless it achieves something.
• Dig for low cards in the beds. The bouquet cannot be blocked, but the beds can. Your real problem is always the Aces and 2s buried near the top of a bed.
• Empty a bed early. Any card can fill it, so a gap is the most useful tool you can have for rearranging.
• Build runs you will not need to break. Because cards move singly, a long run is only useful if it will eventually go up the foundation in order.
• Undo freely. With every card visible, trying a line and taking it back is the fastest way to learn which approach works for a deal.

Common Flower Garden mistakes

• Emptying the bouquet too fast. A bouquet card is never blocked. Playing it onto a bed can block something else. Leave it in the bouquet until it has a real job to do.
• Burying a low card. Because building ignores suit, it is easy to drop a 9 on top of a 2 you will need soon. Before each move, check what it covers.
• Treating a run as a unit. Nothing moves as a block here. A long run of mixed suits is only useful if it will go up the foundations in order; otherwise you will have to unpick it one card at a time.
• Filling an empty bed straight away. An empty bed is your only free space. Use it to reorder cards and then clear it again.
• Judging a deal by its Aces. Our tests showed that starting Aces in the bouquet made almost no difference. Judge a deal by how buried its low cards are in the beds.

Garden tools

In a game where everything is visible, Undo is your notebook: try a line, see where it leads, and rewind as far as you like. Hint, Restart and Auto Play are also on hand. Flower Garden opens free in a browser on a computer, tablet or phone with no account needed. Sixteen bouquet cards plus six beds make a busy screen, so use zoom or fullscreen if the cards feel small. Drag or tap to move; the counter shows wins, time and moves; sound and felt color can be switched.

How we studied Flower Garden, step by step

The spidersolitaire.us team ran this test on September 19, 2026.

1. Traced the rules in our code. Our Flower Garden engine plants six beds of six, keeps sixteen cards in an always-available bouquet, lets any suit build on any other, moves cards one by one, allows anything into an empty bed and has no stock.
2. Rebuilt the game as a program that allows exactly those moves.
3. Dealt 2,000 numbered hands, seeds 1 to 2,000.
4. Used a solver. Every card is visible, so a search for a winning line is the right tool, and its verdicts apply to a person too. Each deal got up to 200,000 positions.
5. Sorted every deal into won, proven impossible or undecided, and recorded how many Aces started in the bouquet.
6. Looked for published figures. Flower Garden is not covered by the main study we check against, Blake and Gent (2026), so we have nothing to compare with.
7. Worked out the margin of error. The 95% range for 43.3% won is 41.1% to 45.5%; for 5.35% impossible, 4.45% to 6.42%.
8. Named the limits. More than half the deals were left undecided. That is why we give a range, 43.3% to 94.7%, and not a single figure.

How the garden was searched

flowergarden.py is our Python 3.11 solver for this game, written with the standard library alone. It keeps a queue of positions ordered by promise, always works on the best, and never revisits a position it has logged. It sends a card to the foundations automatically only when that can never hurt: when it is an Ace or 2, or when every foundation has reached the rank just below it. Because any suit can build on any other, that is the only safe test. A shared runner spread the deals over 19 processes; the run took about 24 minutes. Ranges are Wilson score 95% intervals. We drafted this page and wrote and reviewed the solver with help from Claude, an Anthropic AI assistant; every number is the solver's output.

Flower Garden questions

Is every bouquet card available at once?

Yes, any of them, whenever you like.

Can I move a whole run between beds?

No. Every card moves singly in Flower Garden.

Does suit matter when building?

Only on the foundations. In the beds any card goes on any card one rank higher.

Why can't you tell me exactly how many deals are winnable?

Because our solver could not settle more than half of them within its search limit. We would rather give an honest range.

What is similar to Flower Garden?

FreeCell is the other all-visible classic, and Spider shares its building rule. Every game is listed on the games page.

By Admin, spidersolitaire.us (Solitairen OOD). Research run September 2026.