“When the war began, I saw mothers taking their children and leaving. And I was watching mine hiding in the basement, and I knew I could not take them out. It broke my heart to see them so vulnerable,” recalls Olena, 51, tears streaming down her face as the cold, almost wintry wind lashes her cheeks.

In February 2022, when fighting reached the outskirts of her village in the Kyiv region, the sounds of gunfire and explosions were only five kilometres from her doorstep. As silskyi holova, or head of the village, Olena assumed responsibility from day one. She organized route after route, loading buses crammed with women and children headed west to safety.

But nothing about the evacuations was simple. Overnight, she would find more elderly residents left behind in their homes. “Many young families evacuated abroad, but almost all the elderly were left behind. There was no bread. Shops were closed. Public transport wasn’t running,” she says.

In the weeks that followed, Olena cooked and baked bread for those who stayed. She searched for vehicles to evacuate dozens of children, even as bombs fell with the cold regularity of a ticking clock. Her own daughter, then nine, was added only to the final lists. “She was sent to Germany, escorted by other parents,” Olena whispers, a lump in her throat making her words falter. “She spent six months there in a centre, alone. Because neither I nor her father could leave.”

So Olena stayed.

It was March 2022, nine days into the war. Explosions rumbled from the neighbouring village. A bridge was blown apart. Shelling began, and then mortar fire – first distant, then circling, closing in.

Behind Olena’s house, where she had been growing flowers for the last two decades, 21 greenhouse plots stretched across the courtyard – 2,100 square meters of roses: powder pink, deep red, buttery yellow, bright orange, all arranged in a neat, almost choreographed sweep of colour.

That day, a final blast shattered the air. What had stood as more than twenty glittering, glass-covered greenhouses collapsed into a twisted tangle of blackened metal and shattered panes. The vast bed of roses now glimmered with glass shards that crunched underfoot like frozen rain.

Olena’s love for flowers began long before the war. “I have always loved working with plants. It gives you rhythm, a purpose,” she says, her hands moving with practiced precision as she prunes a row of buttery yeallow blooms.

Before becoming the head of her village and a mother of three daughters, Olena studied ornamental floriculture, earning a degree in agronomy with a specialization in plant protection. Her path into commercial flower cultivation started modestly: two small greenhouses of about 600 square metres in the late 1990s. Over twenty years, those structures multiplied into 21 ares, roughly 2,100 square metres, of roses on land that now spans 56 ares.

After marrying in 1993, Olena and her husband settled in a village in the Kyiv region, building a home and a business that would sustain their family for decades. They began with traditional tea-hybrid roses, a classic variety, known for its high-centred blooms and long stems, prized in floral markets across Eastern Europe.

“Roses kept our family afloat for a long time,” Olena says. “But industrial agribusinesses eventually emerged, and we had to find a new niche.” The couple shifted to spray roses, a variety better suited to compete with large-scale producers while still allowing them to operate with artisanal, hands-on care.

“Greenhouse floriculture offers flexibility,” she explains. “It allows year-round production and helps stabilise output regardless of seasonal constraints.”

For decades, rose cultivation has been central to Ukrainian floriculture.But the war has destabilised this industry, putting extraordinary pressure on small and medium enterprises already operating on thin margins.

This year, the couple focused not on sales but survival. “Our goal was simply to let the plants recover,” Olena says. “We needed the bushes to rebuild their strength and grow green mass so they could survive the next winter. We worked the entire year at a loss, investing in fertilisers, agrochemicals, and constant manual labour, just to have something to harvest next season.”

The war has tested them repeatedly. After the explosion in 2022 destroyed their greenhouses, Olena and her husband spent three years painstakingly repairing them. “We bought every scrap of glass available from neighbours and friends because factory-made glass was too expensive,” she explains. “We fixed every opening. By winter 2024, everything was finally working again.”

But on December 6, 2024, a drone strike destroyed large sections of the structure once more. “Re-glazing was impossible. The prices had become unthinkable,” she says. Instead, they improvised, fastening plastic film to metal supports using zigzag clips. Parts of the greenhouse remain uncovered today.

“Altogether, we collected three cubic meters of shattered glass.”