Her husband’s flowers gave her a great idea!
“FLOWERS bring out love, and Nesha’s Flower Land is all about love,” remarked Nesha herself. And this notion of hers precisely captures the reason she got into the flower business in the first place!
Meet 48-year-old Yasmin Deonauth. This is her real name, but everyone calls her ‘Nesha.’ In the 1980s, her husband, Rudolph, lovingly took a dozen of roses for her on every Saturday while they were living in Washington DC.
“He only paid $5 for the dozen. And they were really beautiful and were in all the colours you could have gotten. And to think that they were so cheap, yet so expensive in an arrangement in the stores. I thought, ‘Hey, I could make money here,’” she recalls.
Apparently, the more she received the flowers, the more she thought of opening the business.
“I’m like a love doctor to a lot of people. I am like a psychiatrist and I am a shoulder to lean on. People come and end up in tears, and you have to comfort them, or you have to give them some of your thoughts. So it’s certainly not about the money for me. It’s about the love of what I do.”
About this time, her family ran a West Indian variety store which had an area for tenants. It so happened that the tenants moved, thus was the place available for Nesha to start her business of fresh flowers, which she ran there for about five years.
In 1994, she moved to Guyana after then President Cheddi Jagan urged her to come home and help to develop the country. “So I decided to come back to Guyana. He said: ‘Hey, do some farming!’ We went and did some farming in #2 Canal Polder for about two years.”
But regular flooding, which washed out their crops about three times, made her forget the idea of farming. The family then entered the furniture business, but that also didn’t work out, so Nesha resorted to doing what she knew best: Flowers, of course!
She seemingly decided to settle on this, since she has now been 20 years in the floral industry. She opened the business first at Hunter Street, in Albouystown, before moving it to Camp Street, then to Wellington Street, and then to Lot 78, Church Street, opposite the St. George’s Cathedral.
The business, or “The Exotic Flower Shop” as is printed on the business card under its name, caters for wreaths; bridal bouquets; fresh, long stem roses and the like. Nesha’s was also the first to bring out the ‘Rainbow Roses’ and one called ‘Magic Love.’
She recalled that when she first opened for business locally, many people knew little about fresh flowers, and concentrated mainly on the artificial ones.
“So I am proud of myself, because I educated a lot of the young people, especially within the Albouystown and Charlestown area. I was able to make a difference. I used to organize seminars and invite school children to visit and experience the flower shop.”
In addition, Nesha also once planted flowers along the entire Sussex Street. At the time of Prince Charles’s visit to Guyana, she planted flowers from St. Stephens Street all the way to the La Penitence Market. And she made sure she paid people to upkeep the surroundings.
More than a florist
“I always told my friends that I wanted to do business. I didn’t think college or university was for me. Business was always my thing,” she recalls.
But the business makes her more than a florist. Take, for instance, the young guys on Monday mornings. A lot of them would visit the shop in search of single roses to say they’re sorry for whatever wrong they had done to their girlfriends. And more often than not, they would not know how to express themselves, or what to write on the card.
“I’m like a love doctor to a lot of people. I am like a psychiatrist and I am a shoulder to lean on. People come and end up in tears, and you have to comfort them, or you have to give them some of your thoughts. So it’s certainly not about the money for me. It’s about the love of what I do,” Nesha explained.
And the business also offers more than flowers. She has things collected from various parts of the world, such as Morocco, China, Iran, Ireland and India, among other places. Hence foreigners are often impressed with the shop when they visit.
“They are impressed also because they find that they could actually get fresh flowers and they don’t have to wait. They just pick up and go. And we always have something different to show people every time they walk in here. You can never see the same old thing.”
Though she personally puts together some of the arrangements, most of the work now is done by her staff. When she started, though, she did everything on her own. In America, she knew little about flowers, and so would put together the arrangements by looking through books. So, feeling that she needed some more knowledge and experience, she decided to do a one year advanced course in floral arrangements at the University of Maryland in the United States.
Nesha’s four children are Dimitri, Samaria, Yashoda and Xaria.
(By Telesha Ramnarine)
