Floral Printable Calendars

Twelve months of botanical art

Each month carries its own arrangement in the same restrained palette: sage, olive, dried grass and a warm cream paper tone, with pressed flower silhouettes rather than bright bouquets. February gets early bulbs, June gets full summer, October gets seed heads and bare stems. It is a herbarium page rather than a greetings card, which is why it survives being written all over.

The extra sheets follow the same idea. A botanical calendar tends to be pinned somewhere a garden, an allotment or a house plant collection is actually managed from, and that place needs more than a month grid. It needs to see next month, it needs somewhere to write intentions rather than dates, and often it needs the moon.

Line art at the edge, or a frame around the whole page

The leaf border sheet runs outlined sage leaves down both outer margins, drawn as line work with a hairline midrib rather than filled shapes. Line art was the deliberate choice: an outline survives a black and white printer, a photocopier and a cheap toner cartridge, all of which turn a filled botanical illustration into a grey smudge.

The framed sheet takes the opposite approach and rules a double filet around the entire page with a leaf at each corner. That is the composition a seed catalogue, a nursery label or a plate in an old botany book uses, and a bare grid never earns it. Between the two you have the choice every botanical printer has always had: ornament at the edge, or ornament as a boundary.

What a growing year needs that a month does not

The two month sheet prints this month above and next month below with both sets of real dates and both sets of marked holidays. Anyone who grows anything reads a calendar this way, because sowing is always an instruction about a date five or six weeks from now. One page answers what to start now and what to start next.

The quarter sheet stretches that to three months, which is roughly a growing season, and the undated planner drops dates altogether in favour of numbered priorities, a goals block and notes. That last one is the sheet for the month you are shaping rather than the month you are recording, and because nothing on it is printed it never goes out of date. The same layout in every design lives on the monthly planner page.

Planting by the moon

The last sheet is the full year of moon phases in the floral palette: every new moon, first quarter, full moon and last quarter, with the date and the time. Sowing by the moon is an old habit with a large following and, whatever you think of it, the table it needs is a real printable and almost nobody makes a pretty one. The instants are computed with the standard astronomical series and are given in UTC, so adjust for your own longitude before you plant anything by them. Every year of it, in every design, is on the lunar calendar page.

Questions about the floral set

Are the flowers different every month?

Yes. Each month has its own arrangement rather than one illustration recoloured twelve times, and they follow the season: bulbs early in the year, full growth in midsummer, seed heads and stems in autumn. The palette is what holds them together, so the twelve printed side by side still look like one set.

Will these print properly in black and white?

The month illustrations will lose their colour, as any illustration does, but the leaf border sheet was drawn as outlines specifically so it does not. If mono printing is your normal case, print the leaf border sheet or the framed sheet: both carry their decoration in line work, which reproduces cleanly at any toner level.

Are the moon times right for my garden?

The dates are right everywhere and the times are in UTC. A phase is a single instant for the whole planet, so a full moon at 23:40 UTC is a full moon on the following day if you are east of about fifteen degrees longitude. For sowing purposes the date column is what matters; for anything more precise, convert the time to your own zone first.