Maryna Kondratiuk, journalist and editor with the news website Tviy Romaniv (Zhytomyr oblast), runs a gardening blog on Instagram and has launched her own website, Sadova Entsyklopediya (lit. “gardening encyclopaedia”). Her passion for plants helps her recover after covering emotionally taxing topics such as the funerals of Ukrainan soldiers killed in action, Kondratiuk told Oksana Trokoz, the Institute of Mass Information representative in Zhytomyr oblast.
Kondratiuk says that her love of flowers stems from her childhood, even though at the time she hadn’t delved into the gardening theory yet.
She took up gardening more actively after she and her husband bought their own house. Her father gave her several thujas, a mugo pine, and a Conica spruce.
“I got really into it once my husband and I bought our own house. Dad gifted me a few thujas, a mugo pine, and a Conica spruce. I set up my first rockery among the piles of construction materials in the back yard — and it turned out lovely. I made another one, and before I knew it, I’d turned every free scrap of land into flowerbeds,” the journalist says.
Later, Maryna started dipping her toes into the science behind it all, and in late 2023 she created a dedicated gardening blog. That was when she started getting her first followers, who were fellow plant enthusiasts.
“I studied the theory so I could understand the processes within a plant, how a flower forms, and how I might actually kill it with my ‘care’. I found it fascinating; my friends and family not so much. Once I realised I’d already exhausted everyone with the minutiae of how a tulip flower forms inside its bulb or the specific characteristics of blunt-leaved cypresses, I decided to start a blog. That was in late 2023,” Maryna Kondratiuk says.
She adds that the blog has allowed her to meet and make friends with people throughout Ukraine.
“I created the blog back when my garden still looked more like a construction material storage yard, but followers who understood that chaos started coming right away. Many of them became my friends, and now, thanks to Instagram, I have a lot of friends all around the country. They’re the kind of people that, if we happened to meet in person, we’d have plenty to talk about for hours,” the journalist noted.
Gardening as a distraction
Maryna Kondratiuk has been covering emotionally taxing topics for Tviy Romaniv, including the funerals of fallen servicemembers, since the start of the full-scale war.
She says that the winter of 2022–2023 was the hardest, with one to two funerals taking place every day.
“Over the winter of 2022–2023, things at my main job started to really get to me. Since the start of the war, I’ve attended every fallen Hero’s funeral and reported on it for Tviy Romaniv. And there came a point where I felt like I was losing it. I couldn’t hold back my emotions as I watched a 13-year-old boy crying bitterly over his father’s coffin. Or a little girl sitting on the hearse beside the coffin, looking at the dead soldier’s face with a completely blank stare. In that moment the child’s pain just pierces you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And the funerals were happening every day, sometimes even twice a day. And every single time, you live through a part of the family’s pain by their side,” the journalist recalled.
During that period, Maryna Kondratiuk found a grant programme offering mental health support to media outlets. Through it, she joined support groups and workshops with therapists. During one such session, a psychologist from Georgia asked the journalist about her hobbies.
“I told her I loved flowers — and not just planting them, but really diving headfirst into the process and studying every last detail. And that’s when she opened my eyes to the fact that my hobby could actually be the thing to save me. She suggested I go weed my flowerbeds for a start. There ground was still covered with snow at the time, and my neighbours watched shocked as I tidied up the rose flowerbeds,” Maryna Kondratiuk says.
Over time, the journalist learned to switch to flowerbed planning thoughts at difficult moments. When she started running out of space for new plants, she started working out ideas for posts on her gardening blog instead.
“When I realise I can’t cope emotionally, I start making new planting plans in my head. Over time I’ve learned to switch into that mode almost automatically whenever I’m starting to get overwhelmed. When things are difficult emotionally and I know all those feelings are about to come crashing down on me like a hammer, a thought pops up out of nowhere that I forgot to feed the tulips, or that I’m yet to plant the calla lilies. Something entirely flower-related and utterly irrelevant to the situation. But even that fleeting thought about the garden calms me down, enabling me to carry on working through the difficult situation much more easily,” the journalist says.
From a blog to a website
Over time, Maryna Kondratiuk’s Instagram blog began to generate revenue. At first, manufacturers would send her gardening goods on a barter basis, and later advertising offers started coming in too.
“Yes, the money is not huge, but even so it’s really great when your knowledge starts paying off. This winter I decided to build a website. With minimal investment it takes a lot more effort, but I’m in no hurry,” she says.
Sadova Entsyklopediya is now up and running and has a steady readership. However, Kondratiuk says, the resource is still at an early development stage.
“There’s still a bit more work to do before I can start making money from it. For me, Sadova Entsyklopediya is more of a hobby — another outlet for my inner gardener. So day to day, I work at Tviy Romaniv first, then Instagram, and in the evening, if I’ve still got the energy and inspiration, on Sadova Entsyklopediya,” she concludes.
IMI has previously reported that Zhytomyr-based journalist Yulia Demus has taken up growing decorative pumpkins. This gave her a way to unwind and later grew into a well-known charity project.
