One day I pulled one of these cards in a position asking ways I can make a greater difference in the world – so I donated to United Plant Savers campaign to save and replant the Goldenseal plant. One of the things we did not want to do was to make the kind of deck where a plant equals a certain quality, like Rose = Love or Sunflower = Happiness. When you go to the back of the book, though, you find instructions on how to make honey, syrups, teas, tinctures, salves and other “crafts” you can make with magical and medicinal plants. If you're looking for more posts about tarot, including a whole collection of spreads, come this way. Iv added a photo of one of the pages, for bee balm, so you ca see what I mean)I can’t say enough about the stunning illustrations on each and every card!

On a less-than deck, that card back design would be fine and I might not even have noticed it one way or the other, but juxtaposed with the breathtaking beauty of the deck art Powell has given us, I do feel like this particular card back falls a little short. The accompanying black and white guidebook for the tarot cards is gently written and simply structured. There’s nothing wrong with that, we just wanted to do something different and perhaps a bit more complex. You can recognize a Major Arcana card by its perspective — all the Majors are either altars or mandalas seen from above. The skilled, creative, intuitive hands of Hijas (daughters), Adelitas (warriors), Madres (mothers), and Curanderas (healers) are represented in the People cards.It's got an attractive clean layout with a page devoted to each card that talks about thge significance of the picture and the plant and what the card would mean in a reading. Then there are the plants on each card which makes these bits of paper and the characters and spirits which inhabit them that much more alive. Then again, I feel that doing it this way not only pushed me to learn to read at a more complex level earlier on (since I love to challenge myself), but it also helped me to understand that even with novelty decks you can read the "traditional language", if you're receptive to it.

Those three sentences appear first on each card’s page and are a kind of distillation of the wisdom of the card and the plant. It's also obviously designed by an herbalist who understands both the practical as well as magickal uses of plant medicine which I really appreciate and is not always a given with cards that feature a lot of botanical imagery. When I was gifted a copy of The Herbcrafter's Tarot by Joanna Powell Colbert and Latisha Guthrie out of the blue (not by the creators themselves, but a friend of a friend), I felt such expansive joy.This deck is very readable and the detailed guide book makes it very easy to understand the connection to a traditional tarot deck and each card meaning. As such, this card also represents activism, passion, and creativity – and fighting for what is right even if it’s controversial.