Of the approximately 120 varieties of clematis that Alla Olhovska grows, none of the more luxuriously beautiful and well-known large-flowered hybrids delight her most. What captivated her were the small, less-cultivated species, many of which have the phrase “leatherflower” in their common names, and are native to the southeastern United States.
Its scaled-down charm makes it a sacred subject for photography, another passion of Ms. Olhovska. But what really impressed her was how well the small bell-shaped flowers with thick petals withstood the increasingly hot and dry summers her garden was experiencing.
For example, Whiteleaf Leather Flower (C. glaucophylla) and Scarlet Leather Flower (C. texensis) are heat tolerant and adapt to difficult environmental conditions to continue blooming.
Two years ago this month, an even more sudden call to adapt was addressed to gardeners themselves and their fellow Ukrainians. War has arrived in Kharkov, where she lives, and in other parts of the country.
Olhovska, now 38, was growing her plant collection in preparation for starting a small unusual plant nursery. However, with the war came new tasks. Her job is to find a way to feed her family even in the face of war.
There were already challenges. Olhovska’s mother-in-law and her grandmother rely on her as her caregiver. And her husband, Vitaly Olkhovsky, who suffered damage to her lungs and heart from a severe coronavirus infection, was in the early stages of her rehabilitation when war broke out.
After a series of missile and drone attacks that destroyed the city and its infrastructure, the family remained rooted in place, unable to afford to relocate, as they had seen many of their neighbors do. .
Olkhovska said she knew it was no longer possible to start a local nursery school because Ukrainians “don’t know what’s going to happen next and their standard of living has fallen very significantly.” Customers have to come from elsewhere.
“When you’re scared and you don’t know what’s going to happen to the area, when you don’t know if you’re going to be able to stay there, if you’re going to survive the winter, buying plants is a no-brainer,” she added. Ta. ”
Nevertheless, it was her garden, especially the clematis, that showed her the way forward.
Cultivate customers for her seeds
Olhovska started by doing what she could only imagine: selling more seeds online.
After all, it was on the Internet that she started learning about plants, when she got her first computer at age 20. Then, just as they do today, enthusiasts and experts began to gather on forums abroad and later on social media to exchange gardening knowledge and seeds. Perhaps, she thought, some of these connections could help her expand her small customer base.
“Selling seeds was like a last resort, a last attempt,” she said. And she was far from confident that her own plans would work out.
But it turns out that Ms. Olhovska’s botanical taste, honed on forums abroad, actually made the seeds in her clematis collection especially marketable. Different selling items.
“I like everything unusual, unusual, difficult and challenging to grow,” she said, but over the past two years, difficult and challenging things have become extreme, and not because of the plants. I did.
Her love of seed plants over hybrids also helps. This is because many non-hybrids can be grown more reliably from seed than the offspring of large-flowered hybrids that do not resemble the parent plant.
But she was drawn to them for other reasons beyond their potential as materials for mail-order seed packets. “This species is the beginning of all the hybrids we have in our gardens,” she said. “My idea was to introduce a collection of wonderful seed plants into the garden in order to try making my own hybrids in the future.”
But during that time, her energies were focused on growing, harvesting, packaging and selling. As she accelerates her efforts, more international orders arrive, including one last spring from Erin Benzine of Floret, a flower farm and seed company in northwest Washington’s Skagit Valley. It also included orders.
Clematis vines make unique cuttings for flower arrangements, so Benzain was searching the web for rare varieties to expand her farm’s selection. She had read about Olhovska’s Seed List and wanted to see it for herself.
It was the photography that attracted Benzain. With over 1 million followers on Instagram and the author of multiple books, including a New York Times bestseller, she has a highly cultivated eye for effective media as well as flowers. ing.
“I was stopped like, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on here?’ These are so beautiful, I wonder how I’ve never seen them before,” Benzain recalled. . “I was amazed at the number of varieties she featured, and the way she presented them in her photos completely stopped me in my tracks.”
Her shopping cart contained more seeds. Soon, messages began to be exchanged between the two women.
Wartime garden documentary
An idea sprouted. Could Ms. Benzain interview Ms. Olhovska for Floret’s popular website? And soon another plan was hatched. It’s a documentary on her YouTube channel for the company.
The 33-minute “Gardening in a War Zone” was released in December with director and producer Rob Finch, who leads Floret’s video-based storytelling efforts. The film is a combination of footage shot by local videographer Ole Halajdić. Mr. Olhovsky, husband of Ms. Olhovska. And Ms. Olhovska herself.
Like her daily life, this is a work of chiaroscuro, an extreme portrait of roses and guns.
As the power goes out again, she is seen sitting at her kitchen table in a hooded fleece robe, working by candlelight. Listening to the sound of air-raid sirens, she counts seeds to be stuffed into small envelopes for shipping.
Olhovska harvests each precious seed one by one from the garden surrounding her grandmother’s house, which she visits regularly from the apartment 30 minutes away where she and her husband live.
This isn’t the first time a conspiracy at grandma’s house has saved a family. The house once belonged to Olkhovska’s great-grandfather, who planted an orchard in the Soviet era after World War II in hopes of providing income and food.
His great-granddaughter is currently growing seeds there. It is not only from the clematis that crawl on the shrubs and decorate the branches with colorful little bells and stars, and later the bubbles on the heads of all their species. There are also valuable varieties such as peonies.
In another scene in the documentary, she holds out a pile of her latest clematis drops in one hand, each seed still attached to its feathery brown tail. “The life I have now, the life I have in my future, is incredible,” she says.
But Finch was most struck by another moment in the documentary, when she saw footage of Olhovska filming herself cutting flowers to take home. “Having fresh flowers is very important to me and I do it no matter what,” she says, searching for flowers. “Even when it’s really difficult, it helps, so it helps you deal with the problem.”
The influence of nature as a restorative and connecting force is almost taken for granted by those involved in the outdoors. “But it was tested here,” Finch said on a recent Zoom call. “Wartime challenges everywhere.”
If there was any doubt about the power of the natural world, this was irrefutable proof.
“Does beauty really matter when it comes to finding food and shelter, getting heat and electricity, and avoiding missile and drone attacks?” he said. “Yes, it still matters.”
Write about flowers, not war
Like any gardener who spends the cold, dark winter months, Olhovska dreams of calmer times ahead, new flower beds of her own, and “her biggest dream is to start her own nursery.”
However, unlike the vernal equinox, the end of the war is not preprinted on any calendar. No date.
“But I hope tomorrow will be a better day for all of us!” she wrote in a recent Instagram Story. “I want to write about flowers, not war.”
Plants, she says, motivate her to “work and stay alive.”
She doesn’t seem to lack motivation. In addition to building her seed business and meeting her family responsibilities during the war, Ms. Olhovska wrote a 124-page e-book about clematis. This is a mini-encyclopedia published last summer, which Floret helped promote and sell.
Page 101 begins step-by-step instructions on how to grow clematis from seed. This may be a particularly interesting section for Mr. Benzine after shopping. On our Zoom call, she confessed that she had ordered extra packets of various packets, just in case, and a back-up of backups.
“No, you won’t fail,” Ms. Olhovska quickly interjected, as if to relieve her friend of the weight of her worries. “If you fail, I’ll send you another seed. I’ll keep going until you succeed.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast path to gardeningand a book of the same name.
If you would like to receive weekly email updates on residential real estate news, please sign up here.
