The Wild Medicine mural portrait installation at Penn OB/GYN is a pilot piece for The Women’s Wild Medicine Initiative. This project has been in the making for years, as it draws from work dating back to 2016, exploring women’s empowerment captured in naturalistically embodied portrait paintings. This mural project serves to highlight the ancient ancestral connection between women and the wild medicines of their cultural roots.

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Women’s history is woven together with plants and the healing arts. 

Amidst the rich patchwork of Pennsylvania’s flora and fauna, few inspire more wonder or enchantment than our native butterflies and moths. With their vibrant colors and patterning, delicate forms, and graceful flight, these winged mosaics have captivated our collective imagination for centuries. Moths and butterflies are both members of the order Lepidoptera, a name derived from the Greek terms “lepis,” meaning scale, and “pteron,” meaning wing. In fact, all moths and butterflies are entirely covered in tiny scales! Another defining feature of Lepidopteran species is complete metamorphosis, meaning they undergo distinct life stages, each completely different from one another. Butterflies and moths have a symbiotic relationship with the native flora, meaning a close, long-term interaction, in which each organism is mutually benefited.

Nestled between tree roots, sprouting along riverbanks, and dotting wide open fields, a careful eye will find precious gifts of nature—wild medicine. Philadelphia is gifted with a great variety of edible and medicinal plants and fungi. Our neighborhoods provide a landscape for foraging natural treasures like fruit trees, nuts and berries, and wild plants—often mistaken for “useless weeds.” For centuries, local flora has provided medical benefits and sustenance that soothe maladies from ear infections to high blood pressure, and boost wellness by aiding sleep, relaxing muscles, and more.

Located in West Philadelphia, John Heinz serves both as a state funded zone of protection for some of Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable wildlife, and as an educational hub for students and residents across Philadelphia County. John Heinz Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum was founded in 1972 after lobbying by concerned citizens as the last local marsh was threatened by industrial expansion. When settlers arrived in Pennsylvania in the 1600s, a process of draining and filling the marshland to create grazing land for livestock reduced the size of marsh from approximately 5200 acres to just under 350 by the 20th century. 

Symbiosis is a term used to describe long-term relationships between two or more different organisms within an ecosystem. There are three categories of symbiotic relationships: mutualistic (both organisms benefit), commensalistic (one organism benefits, the other is unaffected), or parasitic (one organism that benefits at a detriment to the other organism). Like humans, organisms across every imaginable habitat cooperate to survive, reproduce and thrive. Sometimes these relationships are so specific that they evolved together: without the varied species of bacteria we have in our gut, we could not absorb vitamins or digest dairy. Without us, those bacteria would likely not exist at all in their current evolutionary form.

In collaboration with educator and illustrator Katie Lillard, Hagopian Arts produced the Wild Medicine Journal and Coloring Illustration Booklet, inspired by the two murals created for Wild Medicine Eco Mural 15: Mugwort, Mullein, and Mallow. The booklet features twenty medicinal plants rendered in Hagopian Arts’ signature style, blending pattern, naturalism, and realism. 

Hagopian Arts distributed the journal and accompanying foraging guides to schools and community organizations to introduce youth aged 3-18 to ecological awareness in both traditional and nontraditional learning settings.