Things don’t just happen. Gardens do not just magic themselves into being. Good ideas do just not become successful companies in a single day. Everything has a story behind it. How you got out of bed in the morning. How a house came to be painted. How a picture was taken.

Sometimes the stories are simple, like fairy tales, everything works out as it should. The protagonist gets rewarded with fortune beyond all human understanding, happily ever after. And other times, the stories are harrowing accounts of perseverance under excruciating conditions, hard, painful,and ultimately heartbreaking. But all these stories, no matter how different, share a common beginning. There’s always a mother. Without exception, her story, her history, is where your story starts.

The story of Omar Gardens begins with my mother, Ibilola Femi-Pearse. She loved flowers. There was always a floral arrangement in a well-appointed vase somewhere in the house. She liked to buy them, but they weren’t always readily available. Sometimes you had to wait for a week or two before the flowers came back in stock. Her need for flowers grew into a passion for gardening, necessity had become the mother of invention.

My parents believed that togetherness was the very meaning of family. They absolutely refused to do anything in isolation. Every individual project became a family mission. My mother wanted a garden to support her flower habit. She wanted to grow her favourites, roses and anthuriums, and I had to oblige her. It wasn’t my favourite thing in the world to do. All I wanted to do with gardens at the time was play in them and eat the fruits that grew there, like I did at my grandmother’s garden. My grandmother, Elsie Femi-Pearse, had a beautiful tropical garden on Herbert Macaulay Street in Yaba, Lagos. The main attraction of this garden was an apple tree at the back. In fruiting season, it produced loads of fruits. My siblings and I would happily visit grandma to spend time with her plucking fruits. My mother’s garden was not the same.

My mother’s garden was a stream of endless tasks that required me getting my hands dirty. I could be found mulching, treating diseases, removing dead branches, applying manure and raking dead leaves. The anthuriums were easier to tend than the roses were. They gleamed with health and flowered beautifully without much labour. The same was not true of the roses. Till this day, I cringe a little, whenever a client tells me they want roses in their garden.

When I wasn’t working on the garden, especially in the summer holidays, I would be sent to the house of my Aunt and Godmother, Mrs. Obafunke Akinkugbe, in Ile-Ife, to continue my gardening education. She was a diligent mistress. My siblings and I spent our days outdoors, listening to my aunt’s lessons about garden maintenance, pests, plant diseases and we’d be given homework: learning plant names, tracing leaves, flowers and stems, and pressing flowers on paper. Our efforts produced brilliant results.s of flowers, our very own tropical paradise. It was a sight to behold. My mother was thrilled. She never had to go even a day without her beloved flowers