Profile: Donna Rose
Donna Rose was introduced to the Civic Garden Center in 2020 through Ashley Magoffin from Working In Neighborhoods (WIN). WIN had organized a volunteer event at the South Cumminsville Community (SCC) Garden and Greg Potter (CGC Community Gardens Coordinator) and Sam Settlemyre (CGC’s Community Engagement Coordinator) both attended, along with many volunteers.
Donna first got into gardening after retiring in 2014, but, sadly, she experienced the death of both her mother and her son between 2015 and 2019, taking her away from gardening for several years. “I enjoy watching seeds turn into flowers, fruits and vegetables. And I missed it,” Donna said.
The SCC Garden
Donna says that she thinks the pandemic has had a positive effect on residents’ willingness to garden. SCC Garden recruited five new gardeners who will be joining eight returning gardeners for the 2021 growing season. The garden has 27 raised beds for its 13 gardeners.
SCC Garden includes several kinds of fruit trees (peach, pear, apple, plum and fig), raspberries and blackberries and benefits the community by providing fresh delicious fruit, free of charge.
The CGC’s Role
Donna believes that the CGC’s greatest impact in the community is “just being there,” available to the community in so many ways with their many years of knowledge and insight into what makes a community garden “thrive.“ She appreciates how the CGC works through community gardens and in partnership with the neighborhood to help mitigate the impacts of food deserts and as a use for some of the vacant lands in South Cumminsville.
Donna points out how the volunteer workdays give gardeners from other gardens an opportunity to check out other gardens and learn new techniques and growing tips from each other. This kind of incentive and opportunity to develop and maintain gardeners’ knowledge throughout their life is a component of our community gardens program that we’re committed to nurturing.
Workday Memories
One of Donna’s favorite memories is of a workday when volunteers were going to move woodchips from one side of the orchard to an area where a walking path was being created.
“I thought the easiest way to unload the truck filled with woodchips was to back it up to the wall and unload them, but that is not what happened. The truck parked sideways along the wall and the woodchips were unloaded that way. The job got done but I got a kick out of that. That was something that made me go hmmm because there’s always more than one way to do something,” Donna recalled.
The Importance of Community Gardens
We live in an era in which, for many of us, our neighbors are strangers. Community gardens draw members who live nearby, so they provide the opportunity to meet, work beside, and even form friendships with people who might live down the street, but who you might never have encountered otherwise. Many an unlikely friendship has formed at a community garden, often across generational and cultural divides.
Just ask Donna Rose.