The clematis that Alla Olkhovska enjoys most among the 120 or so types she grows are not the familiar big-flowered hybrids, however exquisitely beautiful they are. It’s the small, less commonly cultivated species—those whose common names often include the phrase “leather flower,” many of them native to the Southeastern United States—that have stolen her heart.
Their understated charm makes them ethereal subjects for photography, another passion of Ms. Olkhovska’s. But what really impresses her is how well the tiny, bell-shaped flowers with their thick petals hold up to the increasingly hot and dry summers her garden is experiencing.
White leather flower (C. glaucophylla) and red leather flower (C. texensis), for example, can actually withstand the heat and just keep blooming and blooming, adapting to harsh environmental conditions.
Two years ago this month, there was a more sudden call for adaptation – that of the gardener herself, along with her fellow Ukrainians. In Kharkiv, where he lives, and throughout the nation, the war had arrived.
Ms Olkhovska, who is now 38, was building her plant collection in preparation for setting up a small nursery of rare plants. But with the war came a new mission: to find a way, in the face of it, to support her family.
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 the war broke out.
The family was rooted to the spot, unable to afford to relocate, as so many neighbors saw, following rounds of missile and drone attacks that ravaged the city and its infrastructure.
With Ukrainians “not knowing what’s going to happen next, and a very, very big drop in living standards,” Ms. Olkhovska said, she knew that establishing a local daycare center was no longer feasible. every customer would have to come from somewhere else.
Shopping for plants, he added, just isn’t on your mind “when you’re scared and you don’t know what’s going to happen to the area — if you’re going to be able to stay there or if you’re going to survive the winter.”
Still, it was her garden, and especially her Clematis, that offered, showing her the way forward.
Cultivating customers for her seed
Ms. Olkhovska started by doing the only thing she could think of: selling more seeds online.
After all, she had started learning about plants on the Internet when she got her first computer at 20. Then, as now, hobbyists and experts gathered on foreign forums and, later, on social media to exchange horticultural knowledge and seeds. Perhaps, she thought, some of these connections would help her expand her small customer base.
“Selling seeds — it was like my last resort, my last effort,” he said. And she wasn’t at all sure her plan would work.
As it turned out, however, Mrs. Olkhovska’s taste for plants, honed in those foreign forums, had made the seeds from her Clematis collection highly marketable. Different sales.
“I like anything unusual, anything rare, anything difficult and difficult to grow,” he said, though the difficult and challenging have been pushed to the extremes in the past couple of years, through no fault of the plants.
Her love of species plants over hybrids has helped, too, because many non-hybrid types can be grown more reliably from seed than the large-flowered hybrid offspring, which bear no resemblance to the parent plant.
But he had been drawn to them for another reason beyond their potential as mail-order seed packaging material. “The species is the beginning of every hybrid we have in the garden,” he said. “My idea was to introduce a nice collection of plant species into my garden to try and make hybrids myself at some point in the future.”
In the meantime, however, her energy was focused on growing, harvesting, packing and selling. As she stepped up her efforts, more orders came in from abroad, including one last spring from Erin Benzakein of Floreta flower farm and seed company in Northwest Washington’s Skagit Valley.
Clematis vines make a distinctive filler for floral arrangements, and Ms. Benzakein scoured the Internet for unusual varieties to expand the farm’s selection. He had read about Mrs. Olkhovska’s seed catalog and she wanted to see for herself.
It was the photographs that drew Ms. Benzakein. With more than a million Instagram followers and several books to her credit, including a New York Times bestseller, she has a highly cultivated eye not only for flowers, but also for effective media.
“They stopped me like, ‘Wait, what’s going on here?’ These are very beautiful. How have I never seen this before?’ recalls Ms. Benzakein. “I was blown away by the varieties he presented, and then the way he showed them in the pictures completely blew me away.”
Seeds and more seeds went into her shopping cart. Soon messages began to flow back and forth between the two women.
A documentary of a wartime garden
An idea sprouted. Could Ms. Benzakein interview Ms. 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, directed and produced by Rob Finch, who leads Floret’s video-based storytelling efforts. The film combines footage shot by Oleh Halaidych, a local videographer. Mr. Olkhovskyi, the husband of Ms. Olkhovska. and Mrs. Olkhovska herself.
Like her everyday 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 robe, working by candlelight, during yet another power outage. To a soundtrack of air raid sirens, he counts seeds to pack into small envelopes for shipment.
One by one, each precious seed is collected from the garden surrounding her grandmother’s house, to which Ms Olkhovska regularly travels from the apartment 30 minutes away where she lives with her husband.
This isn’t the first time the plot at Granny’s has come to the family’s rescue. The house once belonged to Ms. Olkhovska’s great-grandfather, who planted an orchard in the Soviet era after World War II, hoping to provide income and food.
Now his great-granddaughter grows seeds there, and not just from the Clematis that shuffle over bushes, decorating their branches with colorful little bells and stars and, later, the froth of all those seed heads. There are species of peonies, too, and other treasures.
In another scene in the documentary, she holds out one hand piled high with the latest Clematis bunches, each seed still attached to its feathery brown tail. “It’s unbelievable how many lives – future lives – I have in my hands right now,” he says.
But it was another moment, a spontaneous one, that struck Mr. Finns the most in the documentary, as he watched footage of Ms. Olhovska filming herself cutting flowers to bring home. “It’s very important to me to have fresh flowers, and I do it no matter what,” she says as she searches for flowers. “Even when it’s very difficult, because it helps — it helps to deal with the problems.”
Nature’s influence as a restorative and connecting force is almost taken for granted by those involved in the outdoors. “But here it was tested,” Mr. Finch said on a recent Zoom call. “Test yourself in a state of war, of all places.”
If there was ever any doubt about the power of the natural world, this was incontrovertible proof.
“Does beauty still matter if you’re trying to find food or shelter, or have heat or electricity, or avoid missile attacks or drone attacks?” he said. “Yes, it still matters.”
Writing about flowers, not war
Like any gardener in a cold, dark winter, Ms. Olkhovska dreams of milder times ahead — new flower beds to build and “my biggest dream, to build my own nursery.”
But unlike the equinox, the end of the war is not fixed on any calendar. There is no date.
“But let’s hope tomorrow will be a better day for us all!” he wrote in a recent Instagram history. “I want to write about flowers, not war.”
The plants, she said, motivate her “to work – and stay alive.”
Motivation seems to be something she does not lack. In addition to building her wartime business and fulfilling her family obligations, Ms. Olkhovska has written a 124-page e-book about Clematis, a mini-encyclopedia she published last summer that Floret helped promote and promote. sale.
On page 101 begins step-by-step instructions on how to grow Clematis from seed, a section that may be of particular interest to Ms. Benzakein after this binge. In our Zoom call, he confessed to ordering extra packs of every variety — and backups of the backups, just in case.
“No, you will not fail,” Mrs. Olkhovska interjected quickly, as if to relieve her friend of the burden of all worry. “If you fail, I will send you more seeds. We’ll 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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