How Does Your Garden Grow
Plantable Nursery & Cafe Plants Seeds of Transformation…
In Scotland, Kirkwood and Donna Hale fell in love with the United Kingdom version of a garden center that combines a nursery and café. In Rwanda, where Donna worked at a center for vulnerable women, the couple discovered how job skills can transform lives.
In Redding, they are combining elements of both experiences in a unique nonprofit business called Plantable Nursery & Café. It opened last month on a downtown corner lot on California Street just south of Gold Street.
The pair plan on drawing from their diverse pasts, including Kirkwood’s career as a landscape designer and Donna’s 30-year background as a teacher, to provide trainees with gardening skills, plant knowledge, propagation techniques, food service experience and other life skills.
The plan is to work with special populations, which includes veterans, people with disabilities, the unsheltered, unemployed, individuals from economically disadvantaged families and people who need support due to a difficult season in their life.
Plantable carries outdoor plants well suited to the North State climate, including trees, shrubs, perennials and grasses. “We want to be known as a specialty nursery,” Kirkwood says. During special sales events, they will offer beignets (a deep-fried pastry usually associated with New Orleans) and coffee sourced from Rwanda.
Combining plant sales and refreshments is a nod to the garden centers the Hales enjoyed in Fife, Scotland, where they lived for eight years. During that time, Donna taught religious and modern studies in high school and Kirkwood started a business with a horticulturist. Together the team designed 200 gardens in a seven-year stretch.
Mutual friends and a desire to be closer to relatives brought the Hales to Redding in 2006 and Kirkwood went to work as a landscape designer for the Sharrah Dunlap Sawyer engineering firm.
The open road called again five years later and the Hales, now with two kids in grade school, moved to Rwanda, where Donna went to work as the director of a training center for vulnerable women called the African Bagel Co.
In the process of making and selling bagels and donuts, trainees – many still trying to reassemble their lives after a monstrous civil war in 1994 resulted in the slaughter of up to one million people – learned how to manage households and other life skills. “It was very fulfilling and rewarding,” Donna says.
Kirkwood taught at a university in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, during the two-year adventure in central Africa.
The Hales returned to Redding, where Kirkwood launched Garden Authority, a landscape design company, and Donna began teaching at Shasta View Academy. Soon, they were ready to bring Plantable to life. The mission statement: “To cultivate community, and to fertilize and seed growth for special populations by acquiring job and life skills that bear fruit in their personal lives, city and nation.”
Kirkwood already has lined up one opportunity to cultivate community by partnering with the city of Redding to help administer the Calaboose Creek Core Revitalization project. The $6 million project, funded by a Clean California grant, includes the creation of trails and wide sidewalks along the historic creek as well as water-efficient landscaping and art fences. A companion project calls for enclosing portions of the creek along Oregon Street and creating a landscaped walkway.
The seasonal creek originates near Benton Airpark and winds through downtown before reaching the Sacramento River near the Cypress Avenue bridge. A portion of Calaboose Creek flows in front of Riverfront Playhouse and behind the Plantable property.
Kirkwood envisions hosting monthly classes on urban landscaping and using Plantable trainees to assist with landscape maintenance, including the use of electric pedal-assist cargo bikes to deliver irrigation water.
The Hales also will encourage their trainees to attend Shasta College to pursue their interests in horticulture and food service. Plantable also works with the Good News Rescue Mission, Healthy Shasta, Viva Downtown and the Smart Business Resource Center. •
plantableredding.org
