Dyana Hesson's Native Plant Portraits Across Arizona
By Chadd Scott on
Plants have been a constant in Dyana Hesson’s (b. 1966) life. Long before she was a painter of plants, plants were a part of her family culture growing up in Northern California.
The family had a garden. Hesson remembers her mother’s green thumb and her brother’s interest in botany developed in high school. That brother took a job at a nursery. In support, Hesson’s father built him a greenhouse. She remembers worm beds around the house.
“All that came first, but I was always a creative kid so when it came time to decide what to paint – when I finally got around to figuring out that I could be an artist – it was a natural progression,” Hesson said. “Since then, I've become more and more passionate about (native plants). (All plants are) pretty to look at. They make beautiful art, but I'm on a mission now to compel people to care about that stuff too.”
Dyana Hesson, 'I'll be Back, Brittlebush over Camelback Mountain,' 2023. 30x60. Private Collection. Image courtesy of the artist.
Stuff like the habitat and food native plants provide animals. How native plants don’t require pesticides or fertilizers. How their longer root systems are adapted over thousands of years to require less watering; how those same longer roots prevent soil erosion by holding the earth in place. How those longer roots also draw carbon out of the air and mitigate stormwater runoff and flooding.
How native plants are a key tool in facing the world’s two existential environmental crises: climate change and biodiversity collapse.
Beauty with purpose.
Hesson shares her passion for native plants during “Wild Arizona: Native Arizona Plants and Places,” an exhibition on view through December 7, 2025, at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum Art Institute in Tucson. “Wild Arizona” is both a visual celebration and a call to action – an invitation to see the quiet resilience of the desert and to join the artist in her lifelong adventure to preserve its wildness.
“My mission is to reach people,” Hesson said. “Maybe (viewers) just think the painting is beautiful, which it should be. It should stand on its own. It should be beautiful. So then I've got you, and then I can share more, and hopefully (viewers) learn and grow as we all want to do.”
Each work in the show is rooted in Hesson’s lived experience, with subjects discovered through hikes, ecological fieldwork, and restoration efforts across the state. Whether planting native willows along the Salt River or rafting through the Grand Canyon, the artist engages the land as both artist and naturalist.
Dyana Hesson, ‘Arizona Blue Star, Amsonia grandiflora, Flux Canyon, AZ.’ 40x30. Oil on Canvas. Private Collection. Courtesy of the artist.
Arizona Native Plants
Hesson painted plants throughout her 35-year career, but a 2019 project for “Arizona Highways” magazine initiated her current interest in native plants. Hesson ran into the publication’s editor at an event in Scottsdale. He’d been following her on Instagram and had a proposal. He wanted Hesson to produce a portfolio of native wildflower paintings for the magazine’s March 2020 issue.
“That's when my focus became more crisp,” Hesson said. “And I love an adventure. I have a love divided between painting and being outdoors. I don't know which I love better, but one fuels the other. I love the thrill of the chase, so to speak, and got addicted to finding things I'd never seen before, finding things that were rare, finding things that had special uses by settlers or Native Americans. That's when it became a thing.”
Her “thing” for native plants led her to join the Arizona Native Plant Society. Every state has a native plant society with local chapters and experts providing community, events, and native plant knowledge for anyone interested in growing their own or learning more.
“It's really snowballed and now I'm on a mission to find everything and paint everything,” Hesson said.
That should keep her busy. Due to its size and diversity of habitats, nearly 4,000 native plants reside in Arizona. Of those, the most famous is the saguaro cactus, endemic (existing nowhere else) to the Sonoran Desert. Hesson sees them every day from her home in Mesa, just east of Phoenix.
Not as many as she used to.
“Areas that I took for granted that we would drive through on the way to the mountains, ancient forests of saguaro, have been obliterated,” Hesson said.
Wildfires.
Climate change.
Development.
Hesson has partnered with Arizona-based non-profit Natural Restorations to replant saguaros in burn scar areas around the Valley. The organization is working on a particularly hard-hit area near the Four Peaks Wilderness not far from the artist’s home.
“We go out and replant these little baby saguaro and the success rate has been really good,” Hesson said. “(Natural Restorations) monitor them and as long as you plant them the way you're supposed to plant them, nature does the rest. That feels good. That's an easy way to get involved. A lot of these fires were man made, so it's the least we can do to try and fix what we screwed up.”
Dyana Hesson, ‘A Thousand Words, Antelope Horns Milkweed and Juniper Hairstreak Butterfly, Near the East Verde River, AZ.’ Bloomed 5-15-24.50x40. Oil on Canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.
Plant Portraits
Hesson is known for her vibrant, large-scale oil paintings, often featuring singular plants in precise, minimalist compositions. Zooming in on individual plants comes from an earlier interest in photography.
“I love landscape artists, I collect landscape art, I admire that they can make a mark and leave it alone, but I'm all about the detail and the light, the shadows; it's just my style,” Hesson said.
Eschewing the landscape to focus narrowly on the plant turns her paintings into portraits in a sense. The detail. The character. The personality. Being introduced to native plants individually starts a relationship. Lemmon’s Butterweed. Brittlebush. Fringed Redmaids.
Knowledge results in recognition. Familiarity. A connection between person and plant develops.
“It is a relationship and the more I paint a certain subject matter, the more I feel I get to know that subject matter,” Hesson said. “For example, prickly pear – opuntia – and agave, I know those subjects well because I've painted them so many times, and so they're like old friends. I know what their characteristics are and how the light moves through them.”
What we know we love. And protect. What humans are ignorant of, we fear. And kill.
Hesson elevates her friends – her plant portraits – with scientific clarity and personal reverence.
“Most of my paintings, I put the date that the thing bloomed because we're losing certain environments; I feel it necessary to make a record,” she said. “I want it known in the scientific community that this particular thing was in this particular place on a certain day, and maybe that will mean something down the road.”
In addition to its Art Institute, the Desert-Sonoran Museum has fantastic desert gardens and trails introducing guests to the area’s native plants, potential future friends.
