The Garden Path
22-card major arcana using color photographs from Australian gardens.
by Melanie Cook · Self Published · 2004
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The record
The Garden Path is, at present, a set of 22 cards depicting the Major Arcana. All the images are colour photographs taken by the deck's creator, Melanie Cook. Many of the photographs were taken in her own garden-hence the deck's name-and in the Australian bush near her home.She lives in Queensland, so trees, foliage and general lushness are very apparent. I like this deck a lot. It's very individual, very intuitive, born out of the creator's own experience of Tarot. It does not seek to imitate the Marseilles, Rider-Waite or Thoth traditions, though it does contain echoes of them.It is subtitled "An Antipodean Tarot". Why? First, the images. The magpie who is The Priestess appears to have a very red beak and is clearly not a European species. The Emperor is an Australian species of beetle, the Lovers are two entwined species of Australian tree, whilst the Chariot card depicts a white-faced cockatoo with an orange spot on its cheek, pale-green head feathers and slate-grey and greeny-white plumage on the rest of its body. Justice depicts a forest that has been decimated by fire, a common experience in Australia. Also reflecting Australian reality, it is a forest that has re-seeded its
The cards
