Rooted in community, plant medicine fosters connection and well-being.
Among Chicago’s steel and glass, there’s another landscape in the city: one connected by plants, people, and healthy communities.
In this exhibition, learn about the many ways plants are used for health and wellness. Delve into the histories and uses of certain plants, including teas, spices, roots, and food crops. Through photography and personal accounts, meet the people cultivating gardens and well-being in Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods.
The exhibition is presented in both English and Spanish. La exhibición está presentada en inglés y español.
In Chinatown, herbal pharmacies are stocked with hundreds of remedies from Traditional Chinese Medicine.
Paul Bick
One plant grown in Chicago community gardens is purslane, considered a weed by some but used both raw and cooked in the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America.
Paul Bick
From pharmacies to gardens, plants shape the landscape of Chicago
Stores across the city offer herbal remedies from traditional medical systems that are hundreds or thousands of years old. Pharmacy shelves in Chinatown are brimming with teas used to support health and target specific ailments. Botánicas in the Pilsen neighborhood are a resource for culturally important practices, offering products for spiritual well-being.
The practice of cultivating plants in gardens across the city also plays an important role in health, wellbeing, and environmental connection. There are about 870 community gardens and urban farms across Chicago, creating shared spaces where strangers can become neighbors.
It’s more than just gardening for me. Now I want to learn about ecosystems, how everything ties into each other. Even though we have all these brick houses and paved streets, there’s trees, and birds. We’re part of the ecosystem.
Anthony, Gulf War veteran
Growing familiar plants is one way that immigrants and refugees can reaffirm cultural identity and maintain familiar culinary and medicinal practices. Vacant lots transformed into gardens provide healthy food and new strategies in neighborhoods facing structural racism—which includes a lack of full-service groceries. All over the city, gardens combat pollution and are home to native plants and important pollinator species like bees and monarch butterflies.
Acknowledgments
Plant Medicine is based upon the findings of an original research project created and conducted by Dr. Molly Doane and Dr. Joanna Michel of The University of Illinois, Chicago, and Dr. Alaka Wali of the Field Museum.
Significant contributors to the project include Emily Tarrant, Paul Bick, Hanwen Zhang, and student researchers from UIC. Special thanks to our community partners and residents of Chicago who shared their stories with us. The exhibition would not have been possible without long-term generous support from Field Museum Women’s Board member Daphne Cunningham. The research project is supported in part by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the UIC Chancellor’s Global health and Wellbeing Seed Grant, for “Cultivating Well-being: The Cultural and Ecological Significance of Urban Gardens in Chicago.”