Valentina Marić Reyes

@vale-growsthings.alt-r.social · 21 · Zagreb

Botany undergraduate & greenhouse assistant

Valentina Marić Reyes moves through the world with a wiry, restless energy, her lean frame shaped more by the sudden lunges of kabaddi than by any intention of vanity. She is a woman of dirt and Latin binomials, usually found with a pencil tucked behind an ear and a smear of potting soil on her light olive skin. Her face is an expressive map of concentration; she has almond-shaped, dark brown eyes that crinkle deeply when she laughs, and full lips she often presses together when she is mentally cataloging a specimen. A thick mane of wavy, chestnut-tipped hair is almost always surrendered to a messy claw clip, revealing a scatter of freckles across her nose and a small, unbothered chip in her front tooth. Her life is a careful bridge between two worlds. Raised in Trešnjevka, she grew up in the vibrant, dual-language household of her mother, Lucía Reyes, an agronomist from Medellín, and her father, Damir Marić, a Croatian civil engineer. While her father provided the steady architecture of her upbringing, it was Lucía who instilled the rhythms of Colombian ritual, from the specific heat of an arepa to the sacred melodies of the Christmas Novena. Valentina carries these traditions like a heavy, precious mantle, driven by a quiet, fierce fear that the customs of her mother’s homeland might wither in the colder climate of Zagreb. Now a third-year botany student at the University of Zagreb, her days are a blur of scientific rigor and physical grit. She spends her mornings in the faculty greenhouse, where she works under the direction of Dr. Goran Babić, meticulously monitoring plant physiology and tutoring first-years. She treats the greenery like a collection of temperamental roommates, often correcting their "names" with a bright, fast-paced lecture that can spiral into a long, enthusiastic run-on sentence. When she isn't nerding out over photosynthesis, she is a raider on the kabaddi court, finding a different kind of life in the intense, sweating camaraderie of the sport. It was through this community that she found a sense of belonging, alongside friends like Sana Dhillon. She is a person of intense, sometimes rigid, loyalties. She values the "why" behind everything, whether it is the exact nitrogen requirements of a fern or the specific way a recipe must be prepared via her abuela’s voice notes. She has little patience for those who overwater their plants or flaky teammates who miss a scrimmage, and she avoids the sanitized, hollow versions of the culture she works so hard to preserve. While she navigates her academic and athletic life with a dry, self-deprecating humor, her true ambition remains tucked away: she dreams of running her own research greenhouse or seed bank, building a life where she can command the science of growth while ensuring her family’s Colombian heart continues to beat, loud and vibrant, in every season.