Horticulture
Check your fingers. Any green there? From mowing the lawn to eating an apple, you interact with plants far more than you think. And a career in horticulture is one of the most varied and rewarding jobs around.
I f it sounds too much like working in a potting shed with your granddad, think again. With horticulture, you can be a scientist working on plant diseases and new types of soil; you can be a therapist working with disabled kids; you can improve thousands of lives by turning grey concrete into blooming flowerbeds; you can work at Wembley; you can appear on a gardening TV show; you can work in rainforests; you can help preserve the future of our planet. Interested now?
’Once you’ve gained the skill set of working with plants, it’s a very varied field,’ says Martin Staniforth, Acting Principal at Kew Gardens in London. Kew takes on 14 students plus six trainees each year; the students are employed and paid by Kew during a three-year diploma, getting practical experience at the world-famous gardens while they study. The course started in 1963, though they’ve been teaching trainee horticulturists there for nearly 150 years. ‘We teach how to work with plants, landscaping, maintenance, how to work effectively in a team, and conservation,’ says Martin. ‘Many of our graduates go on to be the movers and shakers in the industry.’
The horticultured
One such shaker in the making is Lucy Hart. Now 30 years old, she achieved Kew’s diploma a year and a half ago, and is now working on ‘hardy plants’ (that’s the tough ones) in the private section of Kew Gardens. Lucy got the green bug aged 13, while doing work experience at a plant nursery. She left school at 16, studied for a national diploma, and then did a degree in horticulture at her local college. She went on to work for a gardening website for a while, then a landscaping company, before reading about the Kew Diploma. ‘I just love plants,’ she says. ‘I love the smell, the look, and they’re amazingly clever. For instance, we still don’t really know what makes plants flower. And it’s so rewarding – in horticulture, your job is to make beautiful things grow.’
Also at Kew is Joe Robbins. At 18 years old, he’s the youngest student on the course, but his relationship with plants still goes back nearly a decade: ‘When I was ten years old, my mother asked me to help her in the garden. Before long, I was taking on more and more responsibility, and running private gardens after school. There’s always things happening in the garden – every day you learn something new. Things are always changing, too. There’s constant scientific research going on, improving practices and discovering more about new soil types. New opportunities come up all the time around the world.’
‘One of our big problems,’ admits Tim Hughes of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), and a member of the Green Skills initiative that tries to get more young people into horticulture, ‘is to convince people that this isn’t a job for people who have failed academically. Commercial horticulture uses cutting-edge research and technology. Another misconception is that we’re somehow the same as agriculture – they’re related areas but very different in practice.’
Greener pastures
Rather than filling our bellies, horticulture is much more about improving our surroundings. That includes giving us grass to run around on – for instance, without expert horticulturists studying hardy types of grass, neither Wimbledon nor Wembley would have playing surfaces. This, as well as botanic gardens, park and public space maintenance, is what’s known as Amenity Horticulture, or as Tim Hughes calls it, ‘the health of the nation. The other kind is Commercial Horticulture, which focuses on retail gardening outlets and the science of cash crops, including fruit and vegetables.
With around 18.5 million private gardens in the UK and £2bn spent on them each year, there’s plenty of work available in keeping this green and pleasant land from becoming just land. Many people with qualifications in horticulture also go on to work in the media as journalists and TV presenters; others work in the growing field (no pun intended) of horticultural therapy, using gardening to help the development of people with special educational needs.
Dig it
If this sounds good to you, now is a great time to go outside and get your hands dirty. ‘Right now, there is a skills crisis in the industry. There aren’t enough young horticulturists with practical experience,’ says Tim Hughes. To help address this, schemes at Kew Gardens, National Trust properties, RHS gardens and others are giving young people increased opportunities to make a hundred flowers bloom. ‘It’s a fantastic career path for those who take it,’ Tim says. ‘You don’t know where you’ll end up.’
Joe Robbins has an idea or two where he might: ‘I’d love to work on conservation in South America. With horticulture, you can help educate local communities so they can preserve what’s around them, and work sustainably.’
With a degree in horticulture, the world is indeed your orchid.
More info:
- www.lantra.co.uk: the Sector Skills Council covering 17 different land-based areas including horticulture.
- www.rhs.org.uk/learning: the Royal Horticulture Society’s education website.
- www.kew.org/education: for information on training at Kew Gardens.
- The Green Skills Initiative will launch a new website this September.
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