Subi Blooms

To celebrate Mother's Day weekend, the streets of Subiaco will explode with colour and creativity as Subi Blooms takes root once again. Featuring the biggest, most breathtaking display of floral artistry in Western Australia, you can walk amongst botanical wonders of every scale and marvel at a kaleidoscopic collection of floral installations, showcase pieces, and a few new surprises.

The Subiaco Museum is celebrating floral artisty in our own collection with a collection of floral greeting cards dating back over 100 years. 

The history of greeting cards dates back to the ancient Egytian who sent papyrus scrolls and the ancient Chinese who sent messages to celebrate New Years. 

The Valentine is also considered an early precurser to the greeting cards with European's gifting handmade paper and lace paper greeting cards. 

By the early 1800s the greeting cards become popular and affordable, and with the introduction of the postage stamp in 1840 it becomes easier and more affordable to send them. The first known Christmas card is published in London in 1843 when Sir Henry Cole hires artist John Calcott Horsley to design a holiday card for his friends.

Artists in the 1850s start to create handmade cards , and specialist publishers start to produce elaborately decorated cards. Changes in the publishing industry and the devleopments of Louis Prang, who perfected the color lithographic process, mean that the quality and affordabilty of greeting cards increases. 

Our collection of cards date from the early 1900s and include hand embroidered cards, hand painted designs, embossed flowers and lithographic prints. 

Some of the cards in the collection inlude those sent and received by James 'Jim' and Lillian Dennis. 

Mr Jim Dennis and his wife Lillian wrote love notes, often in rhyme, to each other on special occasions from 1908, the year after they met, until Mr Dennis’ death in the late 1940s. 

Mr Dennis came from England as a boilermaker and worked in Coolgardie before meeting his future wife at the boarding house run by her mother in Murray Street, Perth. He was a small man, well suited for climbing into the fireboxes on locomotives at the Midland Railway Workshops, where he worked at this time. Jim met Lillian Philp on her twenty-first birthday in October, 1907. He was thirty-five years older than she. He proposed in January 1908. Lillian accepted him on his birthday in May, 1908. They married in September, 1910 at St Andrews Church, Perth. The couple later lived behind their newsagency and tobacconist’s shop on the corner of Nicholson Road and Coolgardie Street Subiaco. At one time they had a shop and several adjoining houses in Lake Street, Perth. In 1926 they built a house in Cook Street, Crawley. Mrs Dennis lived in the house until she died in 1988 aged 101.