Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Green Thumb: Ainsley House garden volunteer Jules Phirippidis, who worked as an educator for 34 years, has been keeping busy mulching, weeding and clipping the garden's flowers the past two years.
Ainsley garden volunteers blossom
Gardening group needs volunteers
By Moryt Milo
With the official start of spring only a week away, the Ainsley House gardens are starting to wake up, as a handful of volunteers mulch the soil, pull the weeds, and clip withered calla lilies.
Since the public opening of the Ainsley House in 1994, a dedicated crew of Campbell residents have planted more than 60 roses and more than a dozen flower varieties, using an English garden theme. But during the past year, garden volunteers have dwindled, leaving a small group in need of extra help.
"We could really use the help," longtime garden volunteer and Campbell resident Dee Clarke said.
Clarke, 68, and Ellen Palmer,75, have been volunteering since the group's inception in 1994. They remember bringing their own gardening tools, hoses and fertilizers before the city established an annual operating budget for the volunteers.
When the garden was first created, a budget hadn't been considered, Clarke said. But with a few dollars and lots of support from local residents, who donated plants, flowers, gardening tools and supplies, the garden quickly exploded with color.
"When the house was first moved here in 1990, the garden only consisted of a lawn and a few small trees," Clarke said.
Since then the grounds have been planted with climbing roses, Canterbury bells, azaleas, asters, lavender, wooly lamb's ear and an array of seasonal English flowers.
The back garden, which lines Grant Street, welcomes visitors to sit under a magnolia tree, where two white, claw- footed cement benches, donated by Country Woman's Club of Campbell, are placed. There are several birdbaths and birdhouses strategically located in the yard, and a large pergola--an arbor with a roof of latticework--faces the house.
Although the outdoor decorations were added over time, the planting and designing of the garden progressed so quickly that within a year the garden was given the "Best Use of Color" award by the Northern California Turf and Landscape Council.
The back garden is planted with cool colors--lavenders, blues, whites--and a dash of yellow for spark, Clarke said, while the front of the house shows off hot colors in reds, bright yellows, oranges and pinks.
The flowers are a blend of irises, foxgloves, delphiniums, dahlias, cosmos and other traditional English flowers that surround the English Tudor home. The roses, which are tended by volunteer William Surratt, 70, are all patented from the 1920s and 1930s.
Clarke and Palmer researched what belonged in an English garden and read various English-theme garden magazines, but they also remembered what their own mothers planted when they were young children in the 1920s and 1930s.
"For more than 100 years, the garden area was a major thoroughfare for traffic," Clarke said. "The ground was so hard it bent our trowels and broke our shovels when we tried to work the soil."
"We had to ask our husbands to use pickaxes just to break up the soil, and even that took a lot of work," adds Palmer.
The job became easier when the city used a backhoe to dig up the rock-hard clay, put in a drainage system and improved the soil by mixing new dirt with compost.
No matter what the soil conditions, volunteer Jules Phirippidis continues to arrive on Tuesday mornings because he enjoys the camaraderie and feeling of accomplishment.
The volunteers take pride in knowing they helped make someone's wedding or private party special, and it's one of the many reasons they put on garden gloves once a week.
For more information on the Ainsley House garden volunteers, contact Dee Clarke at 408.379.6796 or join the group Tuesday mornings 8:30 to 11:00 a.m. in the Ainsley Gardens, 300 Grant St.
Campbell, California
