A milestone worth celebrating
47th Anniversary Gifts
Hallmark’s theme for the forty-seventh anniversary is garden or plants.
Celebrate the love behind the milestone with a real rose preserved in 24K gold, a lasting keepsake of forty-seven years together.
The meaning behind your year
Gift ideas
Gardens, Parks and Cashmere: Six Anniversary Gift Ideas
A few traditional, a few practical, and all of them better with a note attached.
Good gloves and sharp secateurs
Hallmark suggests quality gardening gloves, a pair each. Add a pair of secateurs with your initials scratched into the handle, so nobody borrows the good ones.
A walk first, then dinner
Hallmark’s simplest idea is a stroll through a public park or garden before going out to dinner. Choose the park near the first place you lived together, and see how much the trees have grown.
A picnic at Wattamolla
Royal National Park, about 29 km south of Sydney’s CBD, was proclaimed in 1879 as Australia’s first national park. Wattamolla, a lagoon tucked behind the beach, is an easy picnic spot; the 30 km coast walk can stay on the wish list.
A garden at waist height
A raised vegie bed at the right height means no kneeling and no bending, and it keeps the gardening going for years. Have it built where you can see it from the kitchen.
A cutting from the old place
If a plant from a parent’s garden or your first house is still growing, ask for a cutting or a division and pot it up. It brings its story with it, and it costs nothing.
Cashmere for cold mornings
Cashmere is the French gift for year forty-seven. One cashmere goat grows only about 150 grams of it a year, so a scarf or a jumper is a fair bit of goat. Choose one for early starts in the garden.
The 24K gold-dipped rose
A gold rose to celebrate forty-seven years together
A genuine rose preserved and finished in 24 karat gold over 60 steps and many months, then polished by hand. Each rose retains its individual shape and character, so no two are exactly alike—a lasting reminder of your first forty-seven years together.
- Includes a certificate of authenticity
- Presented in a luxurious display case, inside a gloss white gift box bearing our debossed gold leaf logo
- A timeless symbol of love, preserved to keep forever
- Rose approximately 29 cm long; display case 34 cm long
What the 47th means
Why a garden
for forty-seven years?
Hallmark gives garden or plants as the theme for a forty-seventh wedding anniversary. A garden is never quite finished and looks a little different every season, which sounds a lot like a marriage closing in on fifty.
Why a garden
A gift that gets better with time
Most presents look their best on the day they’re unwrapped. A plant works the other way round: the lemon tree, the hedge or the climber on the side fence looks better in five years than it does today, as long as someone keeps an eye on it.
It suits this stage of life, too. Plenty of couples find more time for the garden once the working years wind down, and the jobs share out nicely: one digs, one decides, and both get to eat the tomatoes.
Where it began
Ruby, then gold, and nothing in between
The early anniversary lists never reached the forty-seventh. In 1880, Sydney’s Australian Town and Country Journal went straight from the ruby wedding at forty to the golden at fifty, and noted that apart from silver and gold, most of the years were ‘seldom celebrated’.
Even in 1937, Brisbane’s Telegraph said silver and golden weddings were the only ones usually honoured. The gaps were filled much later, when Hallmark gave every year to sixty a gift or theme of its own, and the forty-seventh got something to grow.
Around the world
Cashmere in France, amethyst in Spain
French lists give a name to almost every year, and the forty-seventh is the noces de cachemire, the cashmere wedding. Cashmere is the soft undercoat of the cashmere goat, and the word comes from Kashmir, by way of the Kashmir shawls that reached Europe in the 1800s.
Spanish lists call it the bodas de amatista, the amethyst wedding. The German, Dutch, Italian and Japanese lists skip the forty-seventh altogether, so a garden gift has the field to itself.
47th anniversary symbols
Gardens, amethyst and rosemary
Garden or plants
Garden or plants comes from Hallmark’s year-by-year list, which gives every anniversary its own theme. It’s a modern suggestion rather than an old custom, so read it widely: a plant, a garden visit, or a few hours outdoors together.
None set, but amethyst in Spain
No English-language list names a gemstone for the forty-seventh. If you’d like one anyway, Spain’s amethyst wedding comes with a good story: GIA says people once believed wearing amethyst prevented drunkenness.
None set, so try rosemary
There’s no flower for this year either. In Victorian flower language, rosemary meant remembrance, and after forty-seven years there is plenty to remember. A bush by the back steps comes in handy for the Sunday lamb as well.
Celebrating the 47th
Make a little time for the two of you
Go back to the park where you courted and sit on the same bench (or the one that replaced it), spend a morning at a nursery choosing one plant each without consulting the other, or have the family over for a long lunch outside. Forty-seven years gives you plenty to remember, and a good reason to make time for each other.
Start a planting habit: one new plant on every anniversary from now on, written into a notebook with the date. By your fiftieth you’ll have a small garden of anniversaries.
None of it needs to be grand. A note tucked into the gardening gloves will be found at exactly the right moment.
More romantic anniversary ideasWhat the 47th means to others
Letters that capture forty-seven years
By forty-seven years, a lot of love is shown in jobs rather than words: the bins put out, the car warmed up, the cup of tea that appears without anyone asking. A letter puts some of it into words for once. Here are three to borrow from, and three real stories about gardens and the forty-seven-year mark.
Letters to inspire your own
We wrote these as examples. Borrow any line you like.
Dear Kev,
Forty-seven years ago you promised my father you’d look after me, then took me camping at Seal Rocks in a tent with no floor. It rained for four days. I have never seen a man so pleased with a tarp.
You’ve looked after me ever since, mostly with fewer tarps. You learned to cook after you retired, and your lasagne is now better than mine, which I will deny if you show anyone this letter.
The garden is yours, really. I point and you dig. Thank you for the fig tree that finally fruited this summer, and for pretending not to mind when I gave half the figs to the neighbours.
Happy anniversary, love. Next year, a motel.
All my love,
Lorraine
Dear Gwen,
When we married in 1979 you had a fringe, I had a moustache, and we both had a Holden that would only start on a hill. We parked on a slope for two years.
Since then you’ve raised three kids, gone back to study at fifty, nursed your mother and me through my knee, and kept a straight face through every one of my dad jokes. The grandkids think you hung the moon. They’re right.
I’m not much of a letter writer, so I’ll keep it short. I love you more now than I did on that hill.
Happy anniversary. I’ve booked lunch at the place by the river, the one with the good chips.
Love,
Ray
To us, at forty-seven,
This morning we planted a little lemon tree in a half wine barrel by the back door. The man at the nursery said it would fruit in a couple of years. We told him we had time. He looked doubtful.
Here’s what forty-seven years has taught us. Most arguments are about something else. Good chairs are worth the money. Ring the kids, but not every day.
Here’s what we’re promising. A walk every morning it isn’t raining. Fish and chips by the water once a month. A thank you for the small jobs, even the ones we’ve done ten thousand times.
And when the first lemon comes, we’ll share it. Probably in a gin.
Love,
Us
Worth reading
Real stories and finds about the forty-seven-year mark. Links open in a new tab.
Minnesota columnist John Wetrosky opens his 47th anniversary column with a list of 1975’s highlights, from Jaws to mood rings, then names the one that tops it in his world: his wife, Jackie, married him. He remembers three grandmothers at the wedding, plastic platform shoes he recently found in the garage, and a wedding night planned for Duluth that ended up in Brainerd. Since then they’ve run a business together for more than 30 years, built a house, planted gardens and climbed to the teahouse above Lake Louise, and he signs off by calling the column his gift to her.
In 1959 Lex Graham fished an elephant’s ear bulb out of the water on his morning swim and planted it on a weedy, rubbish-strewn slope at Cremorne Point. It flowered. He and Ruby, who had only recently met, kept planting through their courtship and marriage, using tree ferns from the rocks and plants other gardeners threw out, and left Sydney more than a hectare of garden beside the foreshore walk.
Not every plant gift fits in a pot. Kansas farmer Lee Wilson knew his wife, Renee, had always liked sunflowers, so in May 2023 he and their son planted about 1.2 million of them across 80 acres near Pratt, and kept the whole thing a secret from her. The field was timed for the couple’s 50th wedding anniversary that August, crowds soon came to photograph it, and Renee, his sweetheart since high school, said it couldn’t have been a more perfect gift.
47th anniversary FAQ
