KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — On his way to the Kyiv train station to greet his wife and daughter returning from Poland to Ukraine, Oleksander Tryfonov made a stop. He bought two red roses from one of a half-dozen flower shops lining a dimly lit underpass — something beautiful for the two most precious people in his life. “I haven’t seen them for two years,” Tryfonov, a burly 45-year-old driver said of his family.

“Flowers are important for women.” Flowers have always been linked with Ukraine’s culture, but , their significance has only grown, with blooms becoming a symbol of both resistance and hope. Despite — or perhaps because of them — Ukrainians take every chance they can to fill Kyiv and other cities with flowers from the country’s vast 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 fixed to lampposts; flowers can even be spotted in . They are depicted on Ukrainian banknotes, textile patterns and murals — next to advertising billboards and army recruitment posters.

Across the country, young men on dates and soldiers, sometimes missing a limb, carry bouquets on their return home. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy famously brought a bouquet on a hospital visit in 2022 to a teenage girl injured while fleeing advancing Russian forces outside Kyiv. At an underpass flower stall below Kyiv’s central Maidan.