Volunteer

Volunteer at The Friends of Vintage Roses

Our volunteer coordinators will connect with volunteers via email:
Jody Doss of Lagunitas and Cindy Lopiccolo-Giles of Sebastopol. volunteercoordinator@thefriendsofvintageroses.org

They will check in with you periodically via emails about our work in 2026. And they will provide ongoing support for independent volunteers along with the curator.

Dirt Days

After nearly 25 years of volunteers gathering monthly to help maintain our rose collection, we are putting a pause on Dirt Days in 2026. We want to focus our volunteers on the most pressing of our needs, and we hope to give much more flexibility and a wider range of experiences with the rose collection. Rather than one large group working on a project in the garden, we propose the following options for anyone who would like to help.

Here is the gist of our proposal:

1. The garden requires maintenance; principally in pruning, deadheading and weeding. All areas of the garden have large bare spaces that we want to replant with roses and companion plants. So, we’ll be inviting volunteers to arrange work schedules coordinated with the curator. Some may choose to work on the areas most in need. Some may choose to ‘adopt’ a section of the garden that they can get to know and return to.

—A commitment of 8 hours monthly at the garden

2. We propagate about 3000 plants each year, from cuttings. And we are about to launch an effort to graft some of the rarest and weakest mother roses in the collection, in order to have a strong new mother from which to propagate. We are asking for volunteers who would like to focus on that work. The Curator will be training each volunteer over time, familiarizing them with our current system of rooting and our method of organizing the nursery. This will be more structured than the independent volunteering above. These volunteers would agree to a schedule that can work with the Curator’s calendar and possibly with another one or two participants. We hope to have crews of two or more.

We grow these plants to supply our offsite Curators who commit to preserving and sharing them. Extras go to our annual rose sales.

These volunteers would be learning about and working on:

• Taking cuttings
• Processing cuttings for rooting
• After-rooting care; weeding, feeding, compacting flats, labeling, etc.
• Assisting the Curator and Assistant Curator with the inventory of the mother plants
• Learning skills like grafting and budding, and pruning of mother plants, and container culture

—A commitment of eight hours monthly at the garden

3. We are also looking for a few volunteers who have time to assist electronically with the maintenance of our database of the roses, including keeping track of the roses that are adopted by offsite curators and working with them on their needs. This involves both technical skills, that can be learned, and communication strength, which is powered by a passion for the roses.

A generous donor has made it possible for us to have improvements made to our database which is in FileMaker Pro. This original file is being given a volunteer interface to allow helpers to keep up with the inventory of our collection, our propagation work, and the collections duplicated in the hands of our many curators across the country. The interface is very user friendly, and tasks would be offered in a way that allows a volunteer to grow their understanding gradually. No one needs be an expert, but database understanding is certainly welcome!

—A commitment of 8 hours per month is requested, at home!

4. For those who want to help on a special project, send us an email with your general availability so we can contact you when we have need for more hands! We will likely call arms to assist when we are shipping roses to our curators. It would be a single day or weekend event likely in April or May. These would most closely match our original Dirt Days.

—Likely a half day commitment, offered once or twice yearly

Contact Gregg at curator@thefriendsofvintageroses.org to learn more and sign up!

—Gregg, Jody & Cindy

Our space for parking is quite limited and each volunteer day has to be carefully planned ahead. All volunteer work takes place at the current site of the collection:

3003 Pleasant Hill Rd.
Sebastopol, CA 95472