Holistic shop’s owners take a healthy approach to life

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This article was published 24/08/2015 (3691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Hollow Reed Holistic Centre had barely opened for business when a middle-aged man bounded up the steps from the café, calling out, “Do you have any beeswax candles?”

Turns out the customer, Randy Armstrong, is a non-denominational minister who’d just moved from Kitchener, Ont., with his wife, another non-denominational minister.

“Guess you can’t have too many beeswax candles, huh?” a reporter asked him.

“We have boxes of them, but we haven’t unpacked,” the minister explained, adding Hollow Reed popped up on Google when he ran a search for local sources. “The nice thing about beeswax candles is they clean the air. It’s a natural product,” Armstrong said.

That’s pretty much the way it is at this place. Hollow Reed is a holistic shop of Manitoba-sourced natural herbs, plant medicines, teas and anything else alternative.

It caters to the knowledgable and those seeking knowledge, creating a kind of organically minded community that draws suppliers from local farms and buyers who know good stuff.

Next in were a family with a mom and dad looking for fresh java and a place for their boys, a three-year-old and a 16-month-old, to play.

“What we like about the place is there are toys,” explained the boys’ mother, Robin Vermette.

“When you go out for coffee, and every mom and dad need a coffee, most places don’t cater to kids. You just don’t find that,” she said.

“I wish it were everywhere,” she added wistfully.

Up until three years ago, Hollow Reed was a Wolseley thing, located on Westminster Avenue with a lot of foot traffic from the Winnipeg neighbourhood gentrified in the 1970s and ’80s and nicknamed the Granola Belt. Hollow Reed was a natural fit.

The place is owned by Nancy Hall and Chad Cornell, a couple who relocated after eight years to the café district on Corydon Avenue.

Hall, who runs the café and makes a line of natural beauty products under the label Shining Blue Flower, said the Corydon location exposed their trade to a new demographic. “A lot of people didn’t know a place like this existed in Winnipeg. And now we’re supplying the Canadian market through our website,” she said.

The storefront courts a personal connection with repeat customers.

“People come here because they know we know what we’re talking about,” Hall said. “And it is an interesting place. We have people who bring their out-of-town relatives here, like a tourist place. We love that. The place has that West Coast alternative style, ” Hall said.

Her husband has built up a reputation as a master herbalist. Cornell spent the previous week near Riding Mountain National Park, where he was an instructor at a University of Winnipeg indigenous ethnobotany camp with elders from Keeseekoowenin First Nation. Most afternoons find Cornell booked at the store for herbal consultations. “There are two important messages about this place,” Cornell said, standing at the counter with the store’s till. “This is a place to come where you interact with educated herbalists, as well as a place for education. The reason we combine it with food, the café, is because if people eat the right food, they won’t need medicine as much.”

The commercialization of plant medicines, which can’t be patented by law, is depleting natural stocks and endangering some of the rarer ones, the couple explained. That trade has made the pair protective about their herbal stock.

“We need to become less reliant on medicine, make better choices about our lifestyles. That means disciplining our diets and sometimes taking less medicine,” Hall said.

Local suppliers respect that restraint. Mid-morning, a young Anishinabe man walked in toting a backpack and a large sports bag after making a three-hour drive from his home at Pine Creek First Nation in western Manitoba.

Jericho Flatfoot stooped down and unzipped the bags for Cornell to display a wealth of natural plant medicines he’d gathered and dried.

“I heard about you back home,” he explained, as he and Cornell talked about where and how he’d gathered and dried his bundles of sage and cedar.

“I started with medicine when I was six years old,” he said, describing a system of traditional apprenticeship with his father and elders back home.

“I’ve been at it 12, 13 years. I can’t trade sage for food or clothing back home. You need money. That’s why I came to see Chad,” he said.

The café caters soups and salads, a lunch trade that’s gluten-free and home-cooked. “We still do goodies, but we use buckwheat. It’s still tasty and it has a nice texture, but it’s not wheat flour,” Hall said.

The couple are serious about healthy living but not strident.

“I’m not interested in choking back some horrible-tasting thing just to get nutrients,” Hall said with a chuckle.

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca