Odile Uwimbabazi, 34, is a professional florist designer. Her work entails arranging different kinds of flowers for various occasions. Her hidden side of art and passion for flowers resulted into crafting arrangements to tell stories using flowers, leaves, and plants, working with different people and artists to add a touch of creativity to their artwork. Her obsession for flowers transpired in 2016, after her marriage crushed. Due to the devastation, she was buried in thoughts and pain and soon needed something to light up her world, and somehow forget the pain. Fortunately, she found comfort in flowers. Her love for flowers escalated each and every single day, until she became addicted. Uwimbabazi eventually started a small flower business in 2016, without any idea of how far it could go. But the more she spent time with flowers, the more deeply she fell in love with them and learned so much about them. “Flowers became my therapy, it was unbelievable to see the happiness my flowers brought to my clients, I enjoyed putting a smile on people’s faces, and ever since then, I knew this is where I belonged,” the florist stressed. She however, doesn’t just arrange flowers. Using her artistic passion, Uwimbabazi also makes a number of items out of flowers and leaves such as, dresses, skirts, bags, jewelry, and many others. To her, gifting someone with flowers is good but adding some creativity to it “makes more sense and it is out of the ordinary.” This is because Uwimbabazi adores creativity and doing experimental art with flowers while also exploring their beauty and the meaning they can express. She goes beyond the flowers that people used to locally and uses leaves, plants, or wildflowers, which pulls a unique aspect to her work compared to other florists in Kigali. Uwimbabazi was raised in a family where flowers were loved and taken care of that they even had a floral garden. Given her background, she started respecting the meaning of flowers in people’s lives and relationships and as such, her childhood memories of flowers have highlighted her passion for flowers up-to-date. The florist’s price range for the flowers and the items made out of leaves and plants is between Rwf15, 000 to Rwf70, 000. Some of her challenges however are that since the outbreak of COVID-19, she has fallen short of a variety of flowers, as most of them were initially imported from Kenya. Before the pandemic, she usually got about 30 types of flowers from Kenya, which isn’t the case anymore. Also, the fact that the Rwandan community hasn’t embraced the culture of flowers and their creativity challenges her as she has to convince them to buy. The short life span of flowers is another challenge, because she sometimes experiences losses.
