For a Ukrainian gardener, flowers offer a way forward
The Clematis that Alla Olkhovska enjoys most among the 120 or so varieties she grows are not the familiar large-flowered hybrids, extravagantly beautiful as they are. It is the small, less commonly grown species – whose common name often includes the phrase “leather flower,” many of which are native to the southeastern United States – that have stolen her heart.
Their small-scale charm makes them ethereal subjects for photography, another passion of Ms. Olkhovska. But what really impresses her is how well the small, bell-shaped flowers with their thick petals can withstand the increasingly hot and dry summers her garden is experiencing.
For example, the white-leafed leatherflower (C. glaucophylla) and scarlet leatherflower (C. texensis) can really tolerate the heat and continue to flower and bloom, adapting to challenging environmental conditions.
Two years ago this month, there was a more sudden call to adapt – this one to the gardener herself, along with her fellow Ukrainian citizens. War had broken out in Kharkov, where she lives, and throughout the country.
Ms Olkhovska, now 38, had built up her plant collection in preparation for starting a small nursery for rare plants. But with the war came a new assignment: finding a way to support her family, despite the war.
There were already challenges. Ms. Olkhovska's mother-in-law and grandmother rely on her as a caregiver. And her husband Vitalii Olkhovskyi, who suffered lung and heart damage from a severe Covid infection, was early in his ongoing rehabilitation when war broke out.
The family was left grounded and could not afford to move, as they saw so many neighbors do, after round after round of rocket and drone attacks that devastated the city and its infrastructure.
With Ukrainians “not knowing what is going to happen, and a very, very big drop in living standards,” Ms. Olkhovska said, she knew that starting a local daycare center was no longer feasible; any customers would have to come from elsewhere.
Buying plants, she added, is simply not something you think about “if you are scared and don't know what will happen to the area — whether you can stay there or whether you will survive the winter.” .”
Nevertheless, it was her garden, and especially her Clematis, that cared for her and showed her the way forward.
Customers grow seeds for her
Ms. Olkhovska started with the only thing she could think of: selling more seeds online.
After all, the Internet was where she started learning about plants when she got her first computer at age 20. Then, as now, hobbyists and experts came together on foreign forums and later on social media to exchange horticultural knowledge and seeds. Maybe, she thought, some of those connections could help her expand her small customer base.
“Selling seeds – it was like my last resort, my last attempt,” she said. And she was far from confident that her plan would work.
It turned out, however, that Ms. Olkhovska's taste for plants, honed on those foreign forums, had made the seeds from her Clematis collection particularly salable. Several sales.
“I like everything that is unusual, everything that is rare, everything that is difficult and challenging to grow,” she said, even though difficult and challenging have been taken to extremes over the past two years, through no fault of the plants.
Her preference for species plants over hybrids has also helped, because many non-hybrid varieties can be grown more reliably from seed than the offspring of the large-flowered hybrids, which bear no resemblance to the parent plant.
But she was drawn to them for another reason, one that went beyond their potential as mail-order seed packet material. “This species is the beginning of all the hybrids we have in the garden,” she said. “My idea was to introduce a nice collection of plant species into my garden, so that in the future I could try to create hybrids myself.”
But in the meantime, her energy focused on growing, harvesting, packaging and selling. As she accelerated her efforts, more foreign orders came in, including one last spring from Erin Benzakein Flowera flower farm and seed company in the Skagit Valley of northwest Washington.
Clematis vines are a distinctive filler for floral arrangements, and Ms. Benzakein searched the Internet for unusual varieties to expand the farm's range. She had read about it Mrs. Olkhovska's seed list and wanted to see it for myself.
It was the photos that attracted Ms. Benzakein. With more than a million Instagram followers and several books to her name, including a New York Times bestseller, she has a highly cultivated eye, not only for flowers, but also for effective media.
“I was stopped and asked, 'Wait, what's going on here? These are too beautiful. How have I not seen this before?'” Ms. Benzakein recalled. “I was surprised by the varieties she presented, and the way she showed them in the photos completely stopped me in my tracks.”
Into her shopping cart went seeds and more seeds. Soon, messages started going back and forth between the two women.
A documentary about a garden in wartime
An idea germinated. Could Ms. Benzakein interview Ms. Olkhovska for the popular Floret website? And then another plan quickly emerged: a documentary for the company's YouTube channel.
The 33-minute “Gardening in a War Zone” debuted in December, with Rob Finch, who leads Floret's video-based storytelling efforts, as director and producer. The film combines footage shot by Oleh Halaidych, a local videographer; Mr. Olkhovskyi, Mrs. Olkhovska's husband; and Mrs Olkhovska herself.
Like her daily life, it is a work of chiaroscuro, a portrait of extremes: roses and guns.
We see her at the kitchen table in her hooded fleece jacket, working by candlelight, during yet another power outage. To a soundtrack of air raid sirens, she counts seeds that she has to pack in small envelopes for shipping.
One by one, each precious seed is harvested from the garden surrounding her grandmother's house, which Ms. Olkhovska regularly travels to from the apartment 30 minutes away where she lives with her husband.
It is not the first time that the plot has come to the rescue of grandma's family. The house was once owned by Ms. Olkhovska's great-grandfather, who planted an orchard in the post-World War II Soviet era, hoping to provide income and food.
Now his great-granddaughter grows seeds there, and not just of the Clematis that clamber over the bushes and decorate their branches with colorful bells and stars and, later, the foam of all those seed buds. There are also varieties of peonies and other treasures.
In another scene in the documentary, she extends one hand, laden with the latest Clematis tufts, each seed still attached to its feathery brown tail. “It's incredible how many lives – future lives – I now hold in my hand,” she says.
But it was another moment, a spontaneous moment, that struck Mr. Finch most in the documentary, as he watched footage of Ms. Olkhovska filming herself cutting flowers to take home. “It is very important for me to have some fresh flowers, and I do that despite everything,” she says as she goes looking for flowers. “Even when it is very difficult, because it helps – it helps to deal with the problems.”
The influence of nature as a restorative and unifying force is almost taken as a given by those involved in the outdoors. “But here it was put to the test,” Mr. Finch said in a recent Zoom call. “Obviously put to the test in a war situation.”
If there was ever any doubt about the power of the natural world, this was irrefutable proof.
“Does beauty still really matter whether you're trying to find food or shelter, or heat or electricity, or avoid missile attacks or drone strikes?” he said. “Yes, it still matters.”
Writing about flowers, not about war
Like any gardener in a cold, dark winter, Ms. Olkhovska dreams of gentler times ahead – of new flower beds she will make, and of “my biggest dream, making my own nursery.”
But unlike the equinox, the end of the war is not preprinted on any calendar. There is no date.
“But let's hope tomorrow will be a better day for all of us!” she recently wrote in a Instagram story. “I want to write about flowers, not about war.”
The plants, she said, motivate her “to work – and stay alive.”
Motivation seems to be something she has no shortage of. In addition to building her wartime seed business and fulfilling her family responsibilities, Ms. Olkhovska has written a 124-page e-book on Clematis, a mini-encyclopedia that she published last summer and which Floret has helped promote and sell.
Page 101 begins the step-by-step instruction on growing Clematis from seed, a section that may be of particular interest to Mrs. Benzakein after shopping. During our Zoom call, she confessed that she had ordered extra packs of each type – as well as backups of the backups – just in case.
“No, you will not fail,” Mrs. Olkhovska interjected quickly, as if to relieve her friend of all worries. “If it doesn't work out, I'll send you more seeds. We will do it until you succeed.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A way to gardenand a book of the same name.
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