Cobble Hill - In The Garden 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

A ginger cat and a black cat asleep together in the middle of a garden that has completely taken over. Portrait format, painted flat and bright, and there is almost no sky in it.

What you are looking at

The two cats are curled into each other on a small patch of lawn near the centre, the ginger one stretched out, the black one tucked in against it. They are the only large smooth shapes in the picture and everything else is flowers.

Around them, a garden painted in a flat, decorative, almost folk-art style: a pink blossom tree, a spiky blue-grey agave, tall lupin spires in rose and lilac, white daisies, cosmos, yellow ranunculus, salvias, and a dozen different greens of foliage. A tree canopy closes across the top of the frame, leaving one narrow strip of pale blue sky. The whole picture is built from small repeated marks at the same scale.

What it is like to build

The cats and the sky strip are the only two anchors, and there are only two of them. Take both immediately. The cats are large areas of unbroken orange and black, which is unique in this picture, and the sky is the only pale region.

After that, sort by flower shape and refuse to sort by colour. This is the whole trick. A lupin is a tall spike of stacked florets, a daisy is a white rosette with a yellow centre, a cosmos is a flat five-petal disc, blossom is a loose cluster. There are at least six different pink flowers in here and they are indistinguishable as pink, but completely distinct as shapes.

The foliage is the long middle and it wants the same treatment. Sort the greens by leaf form, strap, round, fern, spiky, rather than by shade. Expect this one to take longer than a photograph of the same size; there is a lot of information and very little structure.

Why the Cobble Hill cut earns its place here

Cobble Hill are Canadian and cut a random cut rather than a grid, irregular shapes with no two alike. On a picture that is a field of repeating marks with no perspective and no hard edges, the shape of the piece is doing most of the work by the second half of the build. The brand's own warning applies: do not try to count the pieces, a random cut does not count out neatly. Linen textured board, poster included.

Specifications

A little context

Flowers and gardens are one of the deepest themes in the category, and the split that matters is between a garden with a structure in it, a path, a gate, a pond, and a garden that fills the frame edge to edge. The second kind is always the harder puzzle and usually the better picture, because nothing has been left out to make room for composition. More at Flowers & Gardens.

This one is out at the moment and we would rather say so than take your money. Ask to be told the moment it returns and you will hear from us first. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.