There's been much talk about the United States Postal Service (USPS) recently.
Suffering from a drop in revenue years in the making, the service has asked Congress for funding to continue to properly deliver our mail.
In an effort to help the USPS insofar as they have the power to, Americans across the country have started buying stamps in droves hoping to ease the financial burden that the institution is faced with. And why not? Stamps are useful and act as collectors' items as well.
This week, the service has released a new set of stamps, this one celebrating the most renowned gardens in America. The "American Gardens Forever" collection is now available for purchase and it highlights ten "gardens ranging form botanical to country estate and municipal gardens," reads the official press release. You can buy them right here.
The featured images were photographed by Allen Rokach between 1996 and 2014. The highlighted destinations include the Biltmore Estate Gardens in North Carolina, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York, the Chicago Botanic Garden, the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, the Dumbarton Oaks Garden in the District of Columbia, the Huntington Botanical Gardens in California, the Alfred B. Maclay Gardens State Park in Florida, Virginia's Norfolk Botanical Garden, the Stan Hywet Hall and Gardens in Ohio and Delaware's Winterthur Garden.
"The love of gardening stretches back to the earliest years of our country, inspiring George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers to plant some of America's most iconic colonial-era gardens," reads the press release. "From the 19th century to today, landscape designers have continued that tradition. Conceived for many reasons—for food or pleasure, as places of education and scientific study, as an expression of the owners' artistic sensibilities, as spaces for the public to commune with nature, or simply for the love of gardening—American gardens capture our imagination and satisfy a yearning for beauty and order."
We love these stamps so much that we've already drafted up a few hand-written letters to send to our nearest and dearest—not that we needed another reason to let folks we're thinking of them in these unprecedented times.
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