She was just 25 years old, a model and an angry young woman coming from a good family who, as she later confessed, might well have been locked up for ever in a lunatic asylum in darker times because of her psychological instability. At that time, in 1955, she came across a masterpiece of garden architecture that moved her deeply: the Parc Güell, created by the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. Faced with the inspired expressiveness that the naturalistic formal language, the colourful mosaics and lush Mediterranean vegetation of Gaudí’s work — started around 1900 — still emanates today, she was fired with an uncontrollable desire to create her own paradise garden one day. “Twenty-four years later I would embark on the biggest adventure of my life, the Tarot Garden.”· Anyone visiting the former quarry near Garavicchio in Tuscany today finds the vital expressive quality of the place irresistible, and senses the powerful presence of Niki de Saint- Phalle, who worked in her paradise garden for over a decade from 1979, and even lived there for certain periods, until she finally died in 2002 of the late consequences of her excessive artistic work with polyester, a material that is damaging to health.