In 1998 Iturbide was invited by Francisco Toledo to Oaxaca, one of Mexico's most biodiverse regions, to photograph the newly opened Ethnobotanical Garden of Oaxaca. Toledo and the Oaxacan botanist and anthropologist Alejandro de Avila founded the unique botanical garden as an alternative to a luxury hotel the local government had planned to build on the site, a former church property that was being used as a dump and an army shooting range. By design, the Ethnobotanical Garden tells the story of the relationship between the people of Oaxaca and their native plants, which are arranged in the garden by ecological and cultural themes. Toledo and de Avila enlisted local gardeners and healers to facilitate the collection of specimens for the garden, and to develop individual protocols for treating plants in need of special care. One area of the garden includes agave plants and cacti that were saved from development projects in other parts of the city; the rarest plants in the garden are kept safely locked in a greenhouse. Iturbide's photographs of the botanical garden, published in her 2004 book Naturata, are mostly images of cacti undergoing therapeutic treatment. Iturbide is drawn to plants in a state of healing, or undergoing a process of transformation, which, she says in a 2016 National Geographic article, she finds "very powerful and very human."
All works are $6,000