A hillside of weeds facing Hollister has blossomed into a community garden on Park Hill. On Friday, gardeners and others celebrated the site’s 15th anniversary.
A hillside of weeds facing Hollister has blossomed into a community garden on Park Hill.
The three-quarter-acre lot—home to potatoes, sunflowers, asparagus, fruit trees and fennel—just celebrated its 15 anniversary with an event Friday that attracted former and current gardeners along with Mayor Ignacio Velazquez.
Cailin McClaflin, 3, couldn’t care less about the dignitaries, though, as she stuffed tiny, homegrown carrots from her mother’s garden plot into her mouth.
“I like that it’s teaching the kids how to grow their own food,” said her mother, Megan Fulford. “They enjoy watching the vegetables grow.”
This year, the family is planting a sunflower house so the children can walk the garden’s main pathway to their plot and sit in the shade of a three-sided group of blossoming, yellow flowers.
Robin Pollard, a yoga instructor for Hollister YMCA, started the garden in 1999.
“It was a weed patch and I just couldn’t take it anymore,” said Pollard, who lives in one of the houses bordering the bustling garden.
Over the years, Pollard has bought and released at least 8,000 ladybugs into the garden, installed a bat home and facilitated the arrival of public art, including a full-size totem pole.
“We’ve been adding art because no garden is a garden without art,” she said.
Some of the art has come directly from the garden such as the “bottle tree” made with pieces of metal found in the garden holding up several colors of wine bottles, which glisten in the sun.
“Every time I come up, I see something new, something different,” said Pollard’s sister Keli Cadenhead, who lives in San Diego but visits about four times a year.
Plant your own garden
The garden currently has spots for three to four people to put their own plants in the earth and add to the pinks, yellows and oranges already in blossom at the site. For more information, contact Robin Pollard at
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