Untrained, I

Why I won't seek qualifications in horticulture and will remain horticulturalish

[ all photographs by me ]

For 19 months, I have been ‘a gardener’. In May 2023, I went to a local garden centre bursting with row after row of blooming perennials in every hue and that was it. I was hooked.

[ An errand that changed my life, 3 May 2023 ]

That day, I embarked on a journey of discovery. I knew nothing about gardens or gardening. I think perhaps I had once planted daffodil bulbs with my mother as a child but that is just as likely to have been a daydream as a memory. My biology teacher was perpetually bullied by my classmates and I, and any information she had to teach me about photosynthesis, stamens and cells passed me by.

But every moment that I have been a gardener I have been learning. In part that is why I have found this such an intoxicating activity.

[ Recording bulb planting ideas at Petersham Nurseries, 6 December 2024 ]

I have wondered about pursuing qualifications (the RHS has the industry fairly well stitched up) or an apprenticeship. The thought makes me shudder. I don’t want to sit in a classroom being told the right way to prune a rose. I don’t want to be one of a team of polo-shirted gardeners learning the policy restrictions of tending a National Trust plot.

[ Learning by doing: planting bulbs, 26 November 2024 ]

Call me petulant, but when the horticultural industry tries to sell me on a need to learn botanical latin, or sit for hours doing worksheets on the science of plants, or tick off a module on ‘turf management’, I want to stamp my foot loudly and yell “NO!”.

When I attended an RHS one-day event called ‘So you want to be a garden designer’ I came away feeling hugely disenchanted, even a little heartbroken. Paving over the extensive grounds of the uber-wealthy is about as far from ‘gardening’ as I can imagine.

[ Attending a garden design careers event at RHS Wisley, 10 August 2024 ]

In order to join this noble profession, we were told, we would need to undertake a diploma from the London College of Garden Design. It would cost thousands of pounds. But it would teach us all the ‘right’ ways the landscape can be landscaped and the outdoors can be made an extension of a newly-renovated, open-plan living space, complete with a single raised bed of low maintenance plants.

I am learning by doing and my education is 100% bespoke. Education by exploration is worth far more than the insanely expensive diplomas on offer.

[ Homegrown blooms, 1 September 2024 ]

“The amateur in gardening is revolutionary, the professional a conservative,” said Arthur Clutton-Brock. This quote (which I have taken from Ben Dark’s amazing book ‘The Grove’ which deserves a post all its own) sums up, in part, why I am so resistant to ‘industry training’. My mind is a riot of ideas, many of which a professional would call absurd.

Learning the ‘right way’ to do things is so often the beginning of the end of creativity, exploration, and self-improvement. Instead, I read the garden writers whose ideas I find compelling, I research the plants that catch my eye, I document my own garden failures and successes, and if I need to know the accepted wisdom on rose pruning there are myriad ways I can still engage with the RHS’ informational diktats.