For the crafty gardener, the Internet can give you a holiday greeting card that's not only beautiful but saves money too.  I love using digital botanical images to create my greetings because they are so unique.

You can create your card using the images I posted in this group's gallery under Christmas Card Botanical Images.  Most of these are from The Illustrated Garden, created by the Missouri Botanical Garden where they have scanned images from their wonderful old botany books and put them on the Internet.

Most of the images are shown within their original books like this:

What I do is use a photo enhancing software and crop out the image so it's nice and clean.

Then I print it out on high quality photo paper and paste onto the front of a blank card.  Such images also work nicely with a paperless holiday email message.

If you want to find more images beyond those posted in this gallery, go to the botanical garden web site and peruse all 63 books featuring thousands of fabulous images to make your greetings your very own!

www.illustratedgarden.org/mobot/rarebook...