I’ve been saving these Victorian trade (advertising) cards all year, since they make me think of Halloween. The Victorians seem to have been fascinated by the idea of people-vegetable hybrids. I feel lucky to have the small collection that I do, because sometimes these cards go for pretty high prices. And then, some of the cards are just too grotesque for my taste, so I skip those.

Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow. William Blake

I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder.  Tom Hodgkinson

Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head. Ambrose Bierce

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables. Gertrude Stein

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent. Ralph Waldo Emerson

An onion can make people cry but there’s never been a vegetable that can make people laugh. Will Rogers

Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself. Henry David Thoreau

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness. Jessamyn West

The essential quality of an animal is that it seeks its own living, whereas a vegetable has its living brought to it. Henry Mayhew

And of course sometimes the Victorians just portrayed vegetables or other foods as people, with arms and legs, which can also be amusing to the eye!

Here are the rest of my Veggie People cards for your enjoyment this Halloween!