My Passion Project: More Medicinal Plants

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know how much I love plants. I love gardening, too, but my plant obsession is a little different – it’s almost like each plant is an individual, a character that I want to include in my little plant community. And each of them have their job – there’s the vegetable garden where we grow food, there are fruit trees and vines, an herb garden, and then lots of flowers for… beauty. Since I was a kid I’ve also loved collecting little herbology anecdotes – lavender oil for calming, chamomile rinse to bring out the highlights in your hair, plantain for insect bites and cuts. But then a couple years ago, I started adding more unusual medicinal plants to the garden, like mugwart, sideritis and feverfew, and I wanted to learn more about them. I started to do more research, and then started painting them, and my Medicinal Plant Series got started.

As it does, life intervened and I got sidetracked with other projects, until this year’s 100-Day-Project. I decided to try doing smaller plant portraits each day, focusing only on the plants I’m growing in my garden. I was able to stick with it longer than I usually have (I really need to simplify my projects!), but the multi-step process of painting and then adding text in Procreate proved to be a bit too clunky to do one every day. I ended up with about 30 of them (and still working!), and I’m planning to add illustrated text to the back of each one to serve almost as flash cards – what they do, how they’re used, what they symbolize, any related folklore and what malady they treat. It’s amazing how many of the everyday plants we grow as ornamentals have served useful purposes for centuries. And I’ve loved learning some of the folktales and myths about the plants and where they came from, or how they gained their healing properties. Here are a few of the portraits, and if you’re interested I’ll share more as the project comes together!