The Garden is card number 20 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows a public garden or park. In the tradition its core sense is society, the public, gatherings and the wider community; events, networks and being seen in company.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 8 of Spades, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the garden takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Der Garten. As House 20 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on public life, social gatherings and matters known to many people rather than kept private. In combination, Garden followed by Heart reads as a public romance or a relationship known to others, while Garden preceding Book reads as a secret about to become public knowledge, one of several pairings in which the Garden's public quality directly overturns a neighbouring card's usual sense of privacy or concealment.