The Tree is card number 5 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 one or more trees. In the tradition its core sense is health and the body, slow organic growth, and deep roots; several trees together can signal a lasting condition.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 7 of Hearts, 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 tree 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 Baum. As House 5 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on health and slow, rooted growth. In combination, Tree followed by Sun reads as recovering health or steady, wholesome growth, while Tree preceding Scythe reads as a sudden threat to health or an illness that cuts a period of growth short. Because the Tree's meaning centres on slow, organic process rather than sudden event, readers conventionally treat it as marking duration, how long a situation has been developing or will continue, when it falls near a card of action.