Grow Your Art (12 Photos)

A mushroom becomes Marilyn Monroe’s skirt.

Yellow flowers fill a tiny underwater scene. Living branches and vines complete painted portraits and comic-book characters.

Across these 12 works, fungi, flowers, foliage and grass are part of the composition—and keep changing it after the artist leaves.

More: When Street Art Meets Nature (40 Photos)

---

🌼 Yellow Submarine — By Sandrine Boulet in Saint-Cast-le-Guildo, France 🇫🇷

Boulet adds a tiny yellow submarine and four Beatles-inspired fish around yellow flowers growing from the pavement. The flowers become the reef.

💡 Nerd Fact: Boulet calls herself a “hallucinartist.” Her official biography says her work is based on pareidolia—the recognition of familiar forms in one’s surroundings—and combines photography, illustration, digital art and in situ interventions.

More: Waterworld — Street Art by Sandrine Boulet

🔗 Follow Sandrine Boulet on Instagram

---

🍄 Marilyn Monroe Mushroom — By Fruktyvrukty in Moscow, Russia 🇷🇺

A black-and-white image of Marilyn Monroe is fixed to a tree trunk. A real bracket fungus grows from her waist and forms the famous windblown skirt.

💡 Fungus Fact: The shelf forming Marilyn’s skirt is the fungus’s visible fruit body. A U.S. Forest Service field guide explains that most fungal biomass remains unseen as threadlike hyphae growing through wood, plant tissue or soil.

More: 11 Mushroom Ballerinas by Fruktyvrukty

🔗 Follow Fruktyvrukty on Instagram

---

🌺 Living Bougainvillea Hair — By Fábio Gomes Trindade in Trindade, Goiás, Brazil 🇧🇷

On Rua Seis in Conjunto Arco-Íris, Gomes places a portrait directly beneath cascading magenta bougainvillea. A painted sunflower and broad leaf frame the face, while the living blooms complete the top of the Afro. In his post about the finished mural, Gomes says the mural was inspired by Egypt Sarai and invites visitors to see it while the bougainvillea is flowering.

💡 Plant Fact: The magenta structures are not flower petals. NC State Extension explains that bougainvillea’s small white flowers are surrounded by brightly colored bracts—modified leaves.

More: Nature Meets Art in Brazilian Masterpieces

🔗 Follow Fábio Gomes Trindade on Instagram

---

🏔️ “Ecosistemi Urbani” — By Edoardo Ongarato in Gubbio, Italy 🇮🇹

Ongarato painted a wall beneath a concrete overpass with a face, mountains and forest. The official TAG 2025 catalogue records it as a mixed-media work measuring 10 × 4 meters, made with spray paint and other paints on a wall. It says the mural represents the bond between people and nature. Real vines cross the painted landscape.

💡 Nerd Fact: TAG 2025 records that Ecosistemi Urbani was selected from 14 street-art proposals and received a €1,800 grant. The relationship between the work and its chosen site accounted for 40 of the 100 jury points, more than any other criterion.

🔗 Follow Edoardo Ongarato on Instagram · 📷 Photo by Street Art Umbria on Instagram

---

🌵 Cactus Figure — By Ahmed M. Yasin in Aseera Ashmaliya, West Bank 🇵🇸

Yasin uses a living prickly-pear pad as both canvas and body. Its rounded outline holds the full figure, while spines, scars and fruit remain visible around the paint. Reuters photographed him working in his home garden near Nablus in March 2016. In a 2016 interview, Yasin said he chose prickly pear for its drought resistance and its symbolism of patience, steadfastness and resistance.

💡 History Fact: Cactus hedges also served as boundary markers. Art historian Kamal Boullata notes that the hedges continued to grow where hundreds of depopulated and destroyed Palestinian villages once stood.

More: Palestinian Artist Paints on Cactus Plants (8 Photos)

🔗 Follow Ahmed M. Yasin on Instagram

---

🌿 Garden Afro — By Minoru in Brasília, Brazil 🇧🇷

Minoru paints the woman’s face, glasses and large flowers beneath a mass of greenery. The foliage above completes her hair and changes as it grows.

🔗 Follow Minoru on Instagram

---

🦌 Nature’s Crown — By BHEJAL near Gauhati University in Guwahati, India 🇮🇳

Pratidin Time identifies BHEJAL as Jintumoni Gogoi and places the work near Gauhati University in Sundarpur. Gogoi said the two branches breaking through the neglected wall made him imagine a resting deer. He completed the intervention in two hours, with the branches becoming the deer’s antlers.

More: Clever Art (17 Photos)

🔗 Follow BHEJAL on Instagram

---

🐾 “DO NOT DISTURB” — By Oakoak in La Louvière, Belgium 🇧🇪

Street Art Cities records the title “Do Not Disturb” and maps it to Place Communale 22. One Marsupilami hides in the overgrown planter while another hangs from a living vine. Oakoak only adds the characters; the plant already looks like their jungle.

💡 Comic Fact: Dupuis dates Marsupilami’s creation by Belgian cartoonist André Franquin to 1952. A Cité des sciences archive records Franquin’s explanation that the name combines marsupial, Pilou-Pilou—the French name for the Popeye character Eugene the Jeep—and ami, French for “friend.”

More: DO NOT DISTURB by Oakoak (3 Photos)

🔗 Follow Oakoak on Instagram

---

🌱 “A Story of Resilience” — By Saype in Decazeville, France 🇫🇷

At the former La Découverte mining site, Saype created a grass painting of a child drawing. His official project record lists “A Story of Resilience” at 10,000 square meters, dates it to 2019 and identifies the medium as biodegradable paint on grass. The image faded as the grass grew and the weather changed.

💡 Nerd Fact: Decazeville Communauté records that Saype diluted the pigments in about 1,000 liters of water, bound them with milk-protein casein, and mixed charcoal with Blanc de Meudon to produce six to eight shades of gray. The mixture was sprayed at 200 bar through a 60-meter hose after the site had been divided into a 4 × 4-meter grid.

More: Huge 10,000 m² Artwork by Saype in Decazeville (7 Photos)

🔗 Follow Saype on Instagram

---

💜 “Sideshow Bob” — By Oakoak in Saint-Étienne, France 🇫🇷

Oakoak’s official gallery titles the work “Sideshow Bob.” Contemporary coverage placed it in Saint-Étienne in May 2015, with purple flowers completing the character’s hair. Each new bloom changes the haircut.

More: Lovely by Oakoak (10 Photos)

🔗 Visit Oakoak’s website

---

🌿 “Phiedra” — By Pejac in Madrid, Spain 🇪🇸

Pejac places a crouching black silhouette and paint bucket beneath a branch-like pattern of red brick showing through the white wall. His original post names the work “Phiedra,” while the official outdoor archive places it in Madrid and dates it to 2013. The exposed brick reaches toward the real foliage at the edge of the wall, as if the figure were painting the tree across the masonry.

💡 Nerd Fact: While studying Fine Arts in Milan, Pejac began making illegal shadow drawings on walls at night, photographing them by day and presenting the images to his professors. He later told El País that most of those professors regarded street art as almost offensive.

More: Street Art by Pejac — A Collection

🔗 Follow Pejac on Instagram

---

🌳 Spike Lee Portrait — By Nuxuno Xän in Fort-de-France, Martinique 🇲🇶

Created in 2013, Xän’s painted figure holds a comb beneath a tree growing over the wall. France-Antilles identifies the subject as filmmaker Spike Lee and the tree as a cerisier-pays, and places the work on Fort-de-France’s eastern approach near the port. The tree’s crown forms Spike Lee’s Afro.

💡 Nerd Fact: In 2019, France-Antilles reported that Radius Developers had reproduced this composition on seven panels in Mumbai for an Instagram campaign. Each copy used real plants for the hair, but the company had neither contacted nor credited Xän.

More: By Nuxuno Xän in Fort-de-France, Martinique

🔗 See Nuxuno Xän’s post on Facebook · 📷 Photo by Rosali Rodrigues

---

Which one is your favorite?