Large print garden word search

The rules

• Eight words from one garden list are printed under the grid. Find each of them in the grid.
• Words run from left to right or from top to bottom, always in a straight line and never backwards.
• Words can cross each other and share a letter. Every listed word appears once and only once.
• To mark a word on screen, tap its first letter and then its last. A found word is highlighted and crossed out in the list.

A steady way through the garden grid

Gardeners will know most of these words on sight, and that is the best help there is. Read the list, then let your eye wander over the grid for half a minute before you search for anything in particular. One or two words usually jump out simply because the brain recognises the shape of MARIGOLD or CABBAGE in a row of letters.

After that, work by line rather than by word. Take the top row and read it slowly from left to right, asking whether any run of letters starts a word on the list. Then the second row, and so on to the bottom. Ten rows read this way will give you every word that lies across. Do the same down the ten columns and you have found all the rest; on this page there is nowhere else a word can be.

Garden words have helpful letter pairs. The double letters in POPPY, CABBAGE, LETTUCE, BARROW and DIBBER are easy to see in a column or a row, and so are unusual letters such as the X in FOXGLOVE or the Z in ZINNIA. If a word on your list has one of those, look for that letter and work outwards in both directions.

If a puzzle is being shared, one person can read the rows while the other reads the columns, and each calls out what they find. It goes quickly and nobody is left waiting.

Tips for printing and playing

• Each puzzle uses one of four lists: garden flowers, the vegetable patch, garden tools, or features around the garden. The name of the list is shown above the grid.
• If today's list is not the one you fancy, press Next. The four lists take turns, so another is never far away.
• For a gardening club or a quiet afternoon indoors, print three or four consecutive numbers to get a spread of the lists.
• The printed sheet has the grid, the eight words, the puzzle number and a link. There is room in the margin to tick the words off.
• On a keyboard, move through the grid with the arrow keys and press Enter on the first and on the last letter of a word.

How these puzzles are made and checked

A separate scan reads the finished grid from every cell in all eight directions. Every listed word must be found exactly once, at the stored position, and the grid must not spell a word from our deny list outside the listed words.

The puzzle of the day is chosen by the date on your device: puzzle 1 was the puzzle for 1 January 2026, and the number goes up by one each day. 366 puzzles, so the same puzzle comes round again after 366 days. Every number stays open in the archive control above the grid. More detail is on the page how the puzzles are made, checked and printed.