A precious moment in time of war: Flowers for a wife and daughter coming home to Ukraine

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — On his method to the Kyiv prepare station to greet his spouse and daughter coming back from Poland to Ukraine, Oleksander Tryfonov made a cease.

He purchased two crimson roses from considered one of a half-dozen flower outlets lining a dimly lit underpass — one thing stunning for the 2 most treasured folks in his life.

“I haven’t seen them for 2 years,” Tryfonov, a burly 45-year-old driver stated of his household. “Flowers are essential for girls.”

Flowers have all the time been linked with Ukraine’s tradition, however since Russia’s 2022 invasion, their significance has solely grown, with blooms turning into a logo of each resistance and hope.

Regardless of hardships introduced by battle — or maybe due to them — Ukrainians take each likelihood they will to fill Kyiv and different cities with flowers from the nation’s huge rural heartland, anxious to reconnect with and rediscover their roots.

Deep purple petunias and yellow rock roses burst out of planters that line Kyiv’s backroads and grand boulevards. Some are fastened to lampposts; flowers may even be noticed in Ukraine’s jail yards.

They’re depicted on Ukrainian banknotes, textile patterns and murals — subsequent to promoting billboards and armed forces recruitment posters. Throughout the nation, younger males on dates and troopers, typically lacking a limb, carry bouquets on their return house.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy famously introduced a bouquet on a hospital go to in 2022 to a teenage woman injured whereas fleeing advancing Russian forces exterior Kyiv.

At an underpass flower stall under Kyiv’s central Maidan Sq., vendor Olha Semynog sells bunches of flowers for $2.50 every. For these with extra of their pockets, she will be able to go all the best way as much as a large bouquet for $75.

Even throughout wartime, her busiest day, she says, is March 8 — Worldwide Girls’s Day. Her enterprise has additionally picked up with males drafted into the navy sending flowers house with on-line orders.

On the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, the place the Russian advance was halted two years in the past, residents nonetheless are inclined to the gardens of their broken or utterly destroyed houses. A park in Kyiv, close to the left financial institution of the Dnieper River, options a big flower set up, welcoming F-16 fighter jets on account of arrive this summer time from Ukraine’s Western allies.

Flowers, explains Iryna Bielobrova, head of Ukraine’s Florists’ Affiliation, are inextricably linked with Ukrainians’ tradition, traditions and celebrated phases of life. They’re additionally an emotional reference to the land.

“Life can’t be vivid, full, and wealthy with out flowers,” she stated. “Wreaths of flowers are preserved for years, and embroidered shirts are handed all the way down to youthful generations.”

Bielobrova fled within the aftermath of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion, transferring to the Netherlands, the world’s flower-producing powerhouse. Compared, Ukraine had a modest pre-war export market.

As soon as within the Netherlands, she labored with different florists who fled to verify flowers had been current every time solidarity occasions for Ukraine had been held in European capitals.

Sunflowers, grown because the 1700s in Ukraine, have turn out to be the nation’s nationwide flower — a logo of Ukraine’s defiance and resilience within the battle.

Fields of the shoulder-high flowers are sometimes seen throughout Ukraine and Zelenskyy’s Cupboard named the flower the image of nationwide Remembrance Day in 2020.

“They supply an escape from the horrors of bombings, destruction, ache, and tears,” stated Bielobrova, who has returned to Ukraine from the Netherlands and lives in Kyiv.

“Feelings are simply expressed with flowers,” she stated. “Every flower speaks for itself, and collectively in a bouquet, they inform an entire story.”

Flowers, Ukrainians say, stand not just for custom but additionally for hope and therapeutic.

Dobropark, a 370-acre (150 hectare) privately run backyard and recreation space west of Kyiv, was rebuilt after a Russian assault and occupation that lasted for greater than a month in 2020.

“This whole space was occupied by the Russian navy,” the park’s panorama designer Olha Lyhvar stated.

When the Russian forces pulled out, the park’s tractors and electrical buggies had been additionally gone, she stated. A 3-story resort that when stood on the property was leveled to its foundations.

In the present day, folks come to the park to “reconnect with nature,” she stated, standing subsequent to a door body — all that continues to be of the bombed-out resort.

”Folks come right here and may really feel the pressure of life and see that it continues regardless of every part,” Lyhvar stated. “We should reside on and discover for ourselves pleasure and wonder in what surrounds us.”

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