Marjolein
Bastin
Twenty-two ornaments across thirty years — cardinals and blue jays, birdhouses and holly baskets, snow bunnies and welcoming wreaths, garden bouquets and papercraft winters. The Dutch nature artist whose woodland watercolors made Hallmark's Nature's Sketchbook one of the company's best-selling lines, on the Christmas tree since 1996 and still blooming.
Christmas Snowman, Holly Basket, Birds Christmas Tree, Garden Bouquet, Honored Guests — five hand-painted ornaments before the formal numbered series began. Joyce Lyle sculptor on 1997 entries.
The first formal numbered series — five consecutive entries, each capturing birds, bunnies, and garden creatures in Marjolein's characteristic watercolor-inspired three-dimensional style.
The longer garden series — ten entries across a decade: Simple Gifts, A Home for a Wren, Winter Wonder, Welcoming Wreath, Bathing Blue Jays, Home Tweet Home, Sledding Snow Bunny, Christmas Cardinals, Winter Roost, Winter Cardinals. Completed 2023.
A Woodland Home, a Watercolor Brush, and Thirty Years with Hallmark
Marjolein Bastin was born in 1943 in Loenen aan de Vecht in the Netherlands, studied at the Academy of Arts in Arnhem, and is considered the most important nature artist in her country. Much of her work is inspired by the flowers, birds, and wildlife surrounding her woodland home in Holland — the everyday natural world observed with the patience and precision of someone who genuinely believes, as she has said, that "the world that lies before us every day is just as beautiful as what's exotic and rare." A Hallmark Cards designer discovered her artwork while on a trip to the Netherlands in the early 1990s. What followed was one of the most sustained and successful artist partnerships in Hallmark's history: more than thirty years, a complete line called Nature's Sketchbook that grew to include greeting cards, stationery, calendars, home décor, and ornaments, and the recognition that Hallmark's Nature's Sketchbook by Marjolein Bastin is among the company's best-selling product lines.
In 2013, Bastin received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the LOUIE Awards — the greeting card industry's highest honors — for her creative spirit, talent, and lasting impact. The award recognized not just the volume of her output but its consistent quality: thirty years of work that never lost the delicacy, warmth, and precision that made it recognizable from the first Hallmark card to the 2025 papercraft ornament.
From a Holly Basket in 1996 to Papercraft Cardinals in 2025
The Marjolein Bastin Keepsake ornament collection began in 1996 with three entries — Christmas Snowman, The Holly Basket, and Birds Christmas Tree — that introduced her signature vocabulary to the Christmas tree: birds, botanicals, the quiet English-garden-meets-Dutch-countryside aesthetic that defines her watercolor work. The 1997 entries (Garden Bouquet and Honored Guests) added the hand-painted ornament format sculpted by Hallmark artist Joyce Lyle, with designs on both sides that gave the ornaments the same sense of completeness as a full painting. These early entries are among the most coveted in the collection for their direct translation of Bastin's watercolor sensibility into three-dimensional form.
The formal Nature's Sketchbook numbered series began in 2003 with five consecutive entries through 2007, each focusing on the birds, bunnies, and garden creatures that appear throughout her paintings. After a gap, the Marjolein's Garden series launched in 2014 as a ten-entry sequence running through 2023 — the collection's most sustained chapter, ending with Winter Cardinals (#10). The 2024 and 2025 papercraft entries (Winter Wonder and Charming Cardinals) continue the collection in a new medium: laser-cut wood and intricate paper construction, a different material expression of the same botanical precision that has defined Bastin's work for three decades. The cardinals that appear in Winter Cardinals (#10, 2023), Winter Wonder Papercraft (2024), and Charming Cardinals Papercraft (2025) form a three-year cardinal study across two different ornament formats.
"I love the familiar and ordinary. The world that lies before us every day is just as beautiful as what's exotic and rare. Nature makes us all rich."
— Marjolein Bastin, in Good Housekeeping, 2003
Bathing Blue Jays Garden Series #5 (2018) · Christmas Cardinals Garden Series #8 (2021) · Charming Cardinals Papercraft (2025 — latest)
Simple Gifts — 2014 (Garden #1)
The founding entry of the Marjolein's Garden series — the ten-entry sequence that ran from 2014 through 2023 and became the longest sustained Hallmark ornament series bearing Marjolein Bastin's name. "Simple Gifts" is the right title for a first entry in a series designed around the philosophy that the familiar and ordinary is as beautiful as anything exotic or rare: a simple gift, a garden seen in winter, the kind of small beauty that Bastin has spent her career documenting. The series it launched would run for a decade and end with Winter Cardinals (#10), the most beloved recurring creature in her entire body of work.
Shop Simple Gifts — Garden Series #1 →The Ordinary World, Made Visible
Marjolein Bastin's work is built on a philosophy that sounds simple until you try to practice it: look at what is already there. The blue jay at the birdbath. The cardinal in the snow. The wren at the birdhouse. The holly basket on the step. The garden in winter, which most people walk past without seeing, and which Bastin renders with the precision of someone who has stopped and looked for a very long time. "I love the familiar and ordinary," she said. The Nature's Sketchbook collection is the proof that this love, when practiced with thirty years of technical skill, produces something that other people recognize as beautiful — not because it shows them something exotic and rare, but because it shows them something they have seen and never quite seen at the same time.
The Keepsake ornament collection translates this philosophy into the specific context of December — which is already, for most people, a time of heightened attention to the small and familiar. The cardinal in the snow is more visible in December than in July. The birdhouse under winter skies means something specific at Christmas. The sledding snow bunny, the bathing blue jays, the welcoming wreath — these are not generic nature images but specific moments from a specific garden artist's specific world, rendered in three dimensions and hung on the tree to be noticed. They reward the kind of attention Bastin pays to nature. They are better when you look closely.
Tips for the Collection
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01Display the Marjolein's Garden series (#1–10, 2014–2023) in sequence for the full garden arc. Simple Gifts (#1) through Winter Cardinals (#10) form a complete ten-year garden journey — each entry a different season, creature, or scene from Bastin's characteristic world. Arranged in numbered order on adjacent branches, they read as a decade of the garden seen through her eyes.
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02Display the 2024 and 2025 papercraft entries alongside the 2023 Winter Cardinals (#10). All three feature cardinals, but in progressively different formats: the 2023 three-dimensional sculptural ornament, the 2024 papercraft Winter Wonder, and the 2025 Charming Cardinals papercraft. Side by side they document how the same subject — Bastin's beloved winter cardinals — can be expressed in multiple media while remaining instantly recognizable.
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03The 1997 Garden Bouquet and Honored Guests are the collection's most direct watercolor translations. Sculpted by Joyce Lyle with hand-painted designs on both sides, these two early entries are the closest the Keepsake collection comes to actually holding a Marjolein Bastin painting. Display them where both sides can be seen — turn them, examine the back as well as the front. The dual-sided design rewards rotation.
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04The Marjolein Bastin collection is the ideal gift for the birder, the gardener, and the botanist in any household. Blue jays, cardinals, wrens, birdhouses, holly, garden bouquets — the entire collection speaks the vocabulary of someone who pays attention to the natural world. For anyone who feeds birds, tends a garden, or simply looks carefully at what is already there, these ornaments are the most personally resonant in the catalog.
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05All 22 Marjolein Bastin ornaments, 1996 through 2025, are at Already Christmas. The complete collection — from the 1996 debut through the 2025 Charming Cardinals papercraft — is here. Thirty years of the familiar and ordinary, made beautiful.
Every Marjolein Bastin Keepsake — 1996 to 2025
Birds · botanicals · cardinals · birdhouses · snow bunnies · papercraft winters. Click any ornament to shop.
A Holly Basket in 1996. Garden Bouquet in 1997. Five Nature's Sketchbook entries, 2003 through 2007. Then the garden opened again in 2014 — Simple Gifts, a home for a wren, blue jays bathing, cardinals in the snow — and closed with Winter Cardinals in 2023 after ten years. Then papercraft: Winter Wonder in 2024, Charming Cardinals in 2025. Thirty years of the familiar and ordinary, observed with patience and rendered with love. Nature makes us all rich.
All twenty-two here.
✦ Part of our Collection: Hallmark Artist Collections, Explored ✦