Roses for Residents goes viral 

A generous donation of crafty beauty brought a splash of color and style to the annual East Park Villa Valentine’s Day Banquet recently. Decorating each of the tables this year were unique handcrafted wooden flowers created by Nancy Ronnau, owner of All Things Fancy in Marquette.
“I thought about this for a couple of years and I wanted to do it now,” Ronnau explained. “Last year I was just bombarded with weddings around that time and I never got to it. Finally this year I said ‘I’m going to do it,’ and I just thought ‘Roses for Residents’ would be wonderful.”
In planning the decorations, Ronnau said she wanted to make sure every resident received a gift on Valentine’s Day.
“It’s easy to do it on Mother’s Day, but not every woman is a mother,” she said. “Then what do we do with the gentlemen residents? So Valentine’s Day was a no-brainer for me. That way everybody could get something and hopefully keep it forever in their room.”
Ronnau worked as an orthodontic assistant in Fremont for 25 years and later as a manager at the HyVee in her home town of North Bend before moving with her husband, Kent, to Marquette in 2016 to be closer to family.
“When we moved here, I thought ‘Oh, I’ll just have all the time with the grandkids,” Ronnau commented. “Well, I had one day a weak that I watched the grandkids and I wasn’t going back to the workforce and just thought I better find something to do.”
“I had a lot of a free time,” she commented. “I was an orthodontic assistant so I loved working with my hands. I Googled ‘new crafts in the United States’ and wood flowers came up.”
“They were made by women in Thailand or India, because the type of plant is a wooden plant,” she explained. “It’s called a Shola plant and they go out and cut that down — all done by hand — and then they shave this plant, roll it, tie each one by hand and cut the flower that they’re trained to cut. A lot of people think these are too soft to be wooden, but they are wooden flowers and will last forever with a little bit of care.”
“When they come to me, they come in what’s called a raw state, which is a cream colored flower,” she said. “What I do then is I will stem them.”
After receiving her first shipment of the flowers, Ronnau developed her own style of arraignment.
“I put them in a little mason jar,” Ronnau said. “One of them I gave away and another one sits on my dining room hutch, which I’ll always keep, because it shows me how far I’ve come in the last six years.”
Ronnau began her business in her home and said the flowers quickly took over two bedrooms.
“My husband was very supportive and he said, ‘I love that you’re doing this, but what are you going to do with the arrangements?’” she commented.
With people interested in her flowers from Aurora to Grand Island and York, she was able to sell 70 arrangements for Mother’s Day in 2020 and eventually sought out an empty building to use as her headquarters. 
“We had an empty building on our acreage here where we live right outside of Marquette,” Ronnau explained. “I asked my husband if he could fix it up and the previous owners of our acreage contacted us and said... ‘That’s a 130 year-old schoolhouse that we moved onto the place years ago.’” 
Having learned the history of the building, Ronnau transformed the former District 89 schoolhouse into a florist shop where she still does her crafts today.
In addition to donating her products to the residents at East Park Villa, she also gifted wooden flowers to the residents of Westfield Quality Care and Memorial Community Care.
“I asked them how many and it came to about 140 (residents),” she said.
With each arrangement costing around $5 to make in time and materials, Ronnau said she at first considered donating the entire amount but then she brought the idea to Kent. 
“I talked to my husband about it and I just said, ‘I’m going to donate these for Roses for Residents,’ and he says, ‘You know, maybe the community would like to get involved, too.”
Ronnau said while creating the arrangements was not a problem for her, asking others to help by donating was a different story.
“I felt very uncomfortable doing it,” Ronnau stated. “Kent along with my daughter, Allison Bonander, convinced me with ‘Just give it a try, Mom, just to see if somebody wants to sponsor a rose.’”
So she shared the idea via her business Facebook page and was surprised by the response.
“I figured I’d get a few people donating,” Ronnau commented, adding, “All 140 roses were sponsored by either people in the community or my customers through my shop within 36 hours.”
“I don’t know the majority of the people who donated,” Ronnau said.  “Every once in a while I’d recognize a name or a last name, but it just was wonderful to see the interaction and the enthusiasm with the community and my customers, too.”
The response was so overwhelming, in fact, that  facilities outside of Hamilton County began to put in requests for Valentine’s Day flowers.
“I’ve also been contacted by facilities in Henderson, Grand Island and in Central City,” she added. “At some point I had to put a cut-off, because I knew my supplies were limited as far as the little bases. I didn’t start even thinking about this till Feb. 1 of this year, so it was a very quick turnaround. There’s been at least 300 people that have responded between the two sites and either liked it or left a comment.”
Wanting to make sure every resident got a gift, Ronnau said she even made extras. 
“There are a few extra I left them with them and I said, ‘(For) any new residents coming in just make sure they get a rose,” she commented.
Ronnau delivered 163 arrangements to East Park, Westfield and Memorial Community in time for the holiday, but was unable to meet the residents this year.
“The facilities have shared pictures with me and it’s just wonderful to see the pictures,” Ronnau said. “I think it was so unexpected for the residents to get something on Valentine’s Day like that. I would’ve loved to have seen the residents and hand the flowers out to them.”
East Park Villa Activities Director Nicole Nelson said the residents who attended the Valentine’s Day banquet were in awe of the flowers decorating their tables and were happy that they were able to have one of their own.
With plans on making her Valentine’s Day flowers a new tradition, Ronnau said next year she will expand her focus.
“I’d love to do a facility in Central City, York, Grand Island or somewhere of that nature, and then take care of the residents in Aurora that are newer and didn’t get them this last year,” she said.
In retrospect, Ronnau said she is still amazed by how her idea of presenting roses to residents blossomed. 
“All I did was do what I loved and created the little arrangement and gave it to them,” she said. “It’s the love of the community that really came through on this one.”