December Tarot Challenge #DecDivination challenge by @alex242505
12/9 Your favorite nature deck
這是參加#DecDivination的挑戰活動，今日主題 12/9: 最喜歡的大自然主題牌
I have many nature decks, ranging from ogham and Celtic tree/plants to sacred nature decks. One deck stood out to me as the most “naturalist” one: The Celtic Tree Oracle by Sharlyn Hidalgo, illustrated by Jimmy Manton.
Every card is a painting of a tree or plant, usually its leaf or berries, sometimes the whole plant including the trunk.
The colors are vibrant, bringing the full life force and the poetic imagination of trees to your sight. In this way, I find it vastly different from other ogham decks, which this is. Since ogham is its own runic system, the art of an ogham deck would be interpreting the existing system, rather than presenting the system itself. Therefore, many ogham decks have very muted tones or similar palette across the whole set, to focus on the ogham few (letter). This deck’s approach, while maintaining its poetic license to presentation of trees, splashes color so that there’s an ebb and flow to the visual and provides the environment in the background.
With the artwork merely being of the tree subjects, they become a great support and stimulation to anyone’s existing ogham work. I have some trees outside my apartment that I’ve been trying to figure out whether they’re birch or white polar, so I compared the two cards quite a bit. I also use them to connect and deepen my memorization of tree appearance, tree names, Irish names and the ogham.
You can use these cards on their own, or cast your own ogham fews and use these to make the point stronger.
With this “nature study” type of artwork, there is not much to go off on for an intuitive reading. I also don’t really want to use the booklet, as it’s only one of the many interpretation of ogham and learning.
In this deck, the “forfeda” association they included are:
- Koad – grove
- Oir – spindle
- Uilleand – honeysuckle
- Phagos – beech
- Mor – the sea
The artwork is why I chose this as the “nature” deck!
Melissa Huang 
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