For a Ukrainian gardener, flowers offer a way forward
Published: 04:02 PM,Feb 24,2024 | EDITED : 09:02 PM,Feb 24,2024
To support her family during wartime, Alla Olkhovska, began selling more seeds online, hoping to expand her foreign customer base. She collects and processes each seed by hand, packing them into envelopes for sale. (Alla Olkhovska via The New York Times)
The Clematis that delight Alla Olkhovska the most among the 120 or so types she grows are not the familiar, large-flowered hybrids, as extravagantly beautiful as they are. It’s the small, less frequently grown species — the ones whose common names often include the phrase “leather flower,” many of them native to the Southeastern United States — that have stolen her heart.
Their scaled-down charm makes them ethereal subjects for photography, another passion of Olkhovska’s.
But what really impresses her is how well the tiny, bell-shaped blooms with thick petals stand up to the increasingly hot, dry summers her garden is experiencing.
The whiteleaf leather flower (C glaucophylla) and scarlet leather flower (C texensis), for example, can really take the heat and just keep blooming and blooming, adapting to challenging environmental circumstances.
Two years ago this month, a more sudden call to adapt was sounded — this one to the gardener herself, along with her fellow Ukrainian citizens. In Kharkiv, where she lives, and around the nation, war had arrived.
Olkhovska, now 38, had been building up her plant collection in preparation for starting a small rare-plants nursery. But with war came a new assignment: to find a way, in the face of it, to support her family.
There were already challenges. 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-19 infection, was early in his ongoing rehabilitation when war broke out.
The family was rooted in place, unable to afford relocating, as they watched so many neighbors do, following round after round of missile and drone attacks that ravaged the city and its infrastructure.
With Ukrainians “not knowing what will happen next, and a very, very big decline in the standard of living,” Olkhovska said, she knew that starting a local nursery was no longer feasible; any customers would have to come from elsewhere.
Shopping for plants, she added, is just not front of mind “when you’re afraid, and you don’t know what will happen with the territory — whether you’ll be able to stay there, or if you will survive the winter.”
Nevertheless, it was her garden, and especially her Clematis, that provided, showing her the way forward.
Cultivating Customers for Her Seeds
Olkhovska began by doing the only thing she could think of: selling more seeds online.
The internet, after all, was where she had started learning about plants when she got her first computer at 20. Then, as now, hobbyists and experts would gather on foreign forums and, later, social media to swap horticultural knowledge and seeds. Perhaps, she thought, some of those connections might 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.
As it turned out, however, Olkhovska’s taste in plants, honed on those foreign forums, had made the seeds from her Clematis collection especially marketable. Different sells.
“I like everything unusual, everything rare, everything difficult and challenging to grow,” she said, although difficult and challenging have been taken to an extreme these last two years, through no fault of the plants.
Her affection for species plants over hybrids has helped, too, because many nonhybrid types can be grown more reliably from seed than the offspring of the large-flowered hybrids, which don’t resemble the parent plant.
As she accelerated her efforts, more foreign orders arrived, including one last spring from Erin Benzakein of Floret, a flower farm and seed company in the Skagit Valley of northwestern Washington.
Clematis vines make distinctive filler for flower arrangements, and Benzakein was searching the web for unusual varieties to expand the farm’s selection. She had read about Olkhovska’s seed list and wanted to see for herself.
It was the photographs that pulled Benzakein in. With more than 1 million Instagram followers and multiple books to her credit, including a New York Times bestseller, she has a highly cultivated eye not just for flowers but for effective media.
“I was stopped like, ‘Wait, what’s going on here? These are too beautiful. How have I not seen this before?’” Benzakein recalled. “I was surprised by the varieties that she was featuring, and then the way that she showed them in the photos just 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.
An idea germinated. Could Benzakein interview Olkhovska for Floret’s popular website? And then another plan quickly sprouted: 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 the director and producer. The film combines footage shot by Oleh Halaidych, a local videographer; Olkhovska’s husband; and Olkhovska.
Like her day-to-day life, it is a work of chiaroscuro, a portrait of extremes: roses and guns. - The New York Times
Their scaled-down charm makes them ethereal subjects for photography, another passion of Olkhovska’s.
But what really impresses her is how well the tiny, bell-shaped blooms with thick petals stand up to the increasingly hot, dry summers her garden is experiencing.
The whiteleaf leather flower (C glaucophylla) and scarlet leather flower (C texensis), for example, can really take the heat and just keep blooming and blooming, adapting to challenging environmental circumstances.
Two years ago this month, a more sudden call to adapt was sounded — this one to the gardener herself, along with her fellow Ukrainian citizens. In Kharkiv, where she lives, and around the nation, war had arrived.
Olkhovska, now 38, had been building up her plant collection in preparation for starting a small rare-plants nursery. But with war came a new assignment: to find a way, in the face of it, to support her family.
There were already challenges. 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-19 infection, was early in his ongoing rehabilitation when war broke out.
The family was rooted in place, unable to afford relocating, as they watched so many neighbors do, following round after round of missile and drone attacks that ravaged the city and its infrastructure.
With Ukrainians “not knowing what will happen next, and a very, very big decline in the standard of living,” Olkhovska said, she knew that starting a local nursery was no longer feasible; any customers would have to come from elsewhere.
Shopping for plants, she added, is just not front of mind “when you’re afraid, and you don’t know what will happen with the territory — whether you’ll be able to stay there, or if you will survive the winter.”
Nevertheless, it was her garden, and especially her Clematis, that provided, showing her the way forward.
Cultivating Customers for Her Seeds
Olkhovska began by doing the only thing she could think of: selling more seeds online.
The internet, after all, was where she had started learning about plants when she got her first computer at 20. Then, as now, hobbyists and experts would gather on foreign forums and, later, social media to swap horticultural knowledge and seeds. Perhaps, she thought, some of those connections might 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.
As it turned out, however, Olkhovska’s taste in plants, honed on those foreign forums, had made the seeds from her Clematis collection especially marketable. Different sells.
“I like everything unusual, everything rare, everything difficult and challenging to grow,” she said, although difficult and challenging have been taken to an extreme these last two years, through no fault of the plants.
Her affection for species plants over hybrids has helped, too, because many nonhybrid types can be grown more reliably from seed than the offspring of the large-flowered hybrids, which don’t resemble the parent plant.
As she accelerated her efforts, more foreign orders arrived, including one last spring from Erin Benzakein of Floret, a flower farm and seed company in the Skagit Valley of northwestern Washington.
Clematis vines make distinctive filler for flower arrangements, and Benzakein was searching the web for unusual varieties to expand the farm’s selection. She had read about Olkhovska’s seed list and wanted to see for herself.
It was the photographs that pulled Benzakein in. With more than 1 million Instagram followers and multiple books to her credit, including a New York Times bestseller, she has a highly cultivated eye not just for flowers but for effective media.
“I was stopped like, ‘Wait, what’s going on here? These are too beautiful. How have I not seen this before?’” Benzakein recalled. “I was surprised by the varieties that she was featuring, and then the way that she showed them in the photos just 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.
An idea germinated. Could Benzakein interview Olkhovska for Floret’s popular website? And then another plan quickly sprouted: 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 the director and producer. The film combines footage shot by Oleh Halaidych, a local videographer; Olkhovska’s husband; and Olkhovska.
Like her day-to-day life, it is a work of chiaroscuro, a portrait of extremes: roses and guns. - The New York Times