Matching Game: Flowers
Flip two cards at a time and match each flower to its name. Every card says whether it is a Flower or a Name, and a pair is always one of each. The game counts a mistake when you miss a match on a card you have already seen.
How to tell them apart
Each drawing is built round the one thing that gives the flower away. An iris has three falls hanging down and three standards standing up. A daffodil has a trumpet in the middle of a star. A bluebell hangs all its flowers from one side of a stem that droops at the tip, and a foxglove does the same up a tall spike.
Some pairs are easy to mix up. A lotus holds its flower up above the water, and its round leaves have no slit. A water lily’s flower usually floats, and each of its pads has a slit cut into it. A daisy, a sunflower, a dandelion and a cornflower each look like one flower but are a head of many tiny florets packed together. Many magnolias flower on bare wood before their leaves come out, while the Japanese cherry opens its new leaves at the same time as its flowers.
How to remember the names
Link something you see in the drawing to the sound of the name with a mental image. For the foxglove, you might picture a fox pulling the spotted flowers on over its paws like gloves. The stranger the picture, the easier it is to recall. See how to create mnemonic images for more ways to build them.
To remember where each card is, give every position on the board a place in a memory palace, and walk back through the palace when you need to find a partner.
About the drawings
The flowers are drawn for this site. Many of them come in more colours than one, such as the tulip, the lily and the sweet pea, and each is drawn in a single common colour, so look at the shape and not the colour.
Each name means one plant. The bluebell is the English bluebell, since in Scotland the name means the harebell. The daisy is the common daisy of lawns, the poppy is the red field poppy and the lotus is the sacred lotus. Three names in the deck have lily in them, but only the lily is a true lily. The water lily and the lily of the valley belong to other families.
Try a bigger board
Every game deals a different set of flowers, so play again to meet new ones. Once you can clear a small board with only a few mistakes, move up a size.
Try another matching game or see all of our free memory games.
