Plants in Place of Tarot's Traditional Figures

The Herbal Healing Deck is a forty eight card deck created by herbalist Sarah Baldwin with illustrations by Ashley Verkamp, published by Schiffer in 2016. Its cards key each of the forty eight to a medicinal or culinary herb and its traditional healing and folk uses, positioning plants rather than the human figures, symbols or mythic creatures most oracle decks favor as its central imagery, a structural choice shared with few other decks in the wider genre and distinct even from the animal centered structure of decks such as Colette Baron-Reid's Spirit Animal Oracle.

Read intuitively, each card matched to a specific herb and its traditional folk healing uses, the deck draws on herbalism, a practice spanning a wide range from historically documented traditional plant use to claims of energetic or spiritual plant properties that fall outside pharmacological testing. Baldwin's deck and its accompanying material present both registers, documented folk history and personal spiritual practice, without drawing a sharp line between them for readers, consistent with how herbalism is typically presented across the modern wellness and oracle publishing space rather than separated into clinical and spiritual categories.