The Garden Oracle - 44 collage cards with vintage botanical illustrations
Gardens work on their own schedule. They ask for patience when seeding, attention when pruning, and the ability to recognise when something is ready to harvest. The Garden Oracle by Bethany van Rijswijk and Ellen Freeman applies that same logic to personal questions.
The set contains 44 cards, each representing an action, a plant species, a garden feature, or a creature found in a garden. The connections between those categories form the core of this oracle.
What you see on the cards
Bethany van Rijswijk works with collages made from vintage botanical illustrations. The cards carry a familiar, period quality: drawn plants, insects and garden details that belong more naturally in a nineteenth-century herbal than in a modern oracle. The visual language is concrete and illustrative rather than abstract or heavily symbolic.
Each card carries a meaning that is developed further in the guidebook. Ellen Freeman wrote the texts with attention to layers and connections: a plant is never just a plant, and an action like pruning or scattering seeds holds multiple meanings at once.
How the garden metaphor works
The oracle uses gardening as a framework for personal cycles. Nourishing roots, understanding seasons, pruning excess, harvesting gifts: these images work both literally and figuratively. That makes the cards readable in a direct way, without requiring deep familiarity with oracle systems.
The guidebook is included and sits alongside the cards in the box. The exact page count is not specified in the product information.
Draw a card for a question about timing or a sense of being stuck, and look at which garden action appears. Watering asks for patience. Scattering seeds asks for a beginning. The images hold up without lengthy interpretation.
About Bethany van Rijswijk and Ellen Freeman
Bethany van Rijswijk is the artist behind the collages. She works with vintage source material to build original compositions. Ellen Freeman wrote the accompanying texts. Together they have created an oracle where image and word are calibrated to each other.
Specifications
- Number of cards: 44
- Language: English
- Contents: Cards and guidebook in a box
- Illustrator: Bethany van Rijswijk
- Text author: Ellen Freeman
- Image style: Collages from vintage botanical illustrations
Questions we often get
What language are the cards and guidebook in?
Both the cards and the guidebook are in English. No other language edition is available.
How large are the cards, and how long is the guidebook?
The exact card dimensions and guidebook page count are not provided by the publisher. The cards and guidebook are packaged together in a single box.
