Now that Spring is both officially and actually here, this week on the Post we are celebrating spring blossom. The Impressionists were drawn to "trees courageous with blossom", as Kathleen Jamie put it in her poem, their techniques ideally suited to the fleeting nature of the small, modest flowers. This is Orchard in Bloom, Louveciennes (1872, National Gallery of Art, Washington) by Camille Pissarro (1830-1903). 

Envelopes (2005) by Harriet Russell is delightful. The book brings together the 100+ envelopes she created with different ways of communicating an address, such as mazes, puzzles, illustrations, joining dots, and old maps. As Lynne Truss says in her foreword, “each envelope… is also a triumph of humanity – because... in nearly every case, the letter arrived! Therefore a human person must have worked out Harriet’s code." As the project evolved, the postal workers started writing “Solved by the Glasgow Mail Centre” on the backs of the envelopes, and added their own annotations. It is a work of wit, humour, and faith in the postal system.

Some senders cannot resist adding a body to the face on a stamp or several stamps to great effect (although it is an offence to deface the actual stamp). Axel Scheffler (b.1957), illustrator ofThe Gruffalo is famed for his inventively illustrated envelopes, two hundred of which had their own exhibitions in Frankfurt and Leipzig in 2022.