We hear it frequently: “How do we get more young people into horticulture?”

It is a fair question.

But I have begun to wonder whether it is the right question.

Perhaps we should first ask:

What are we actually inviting young people to become?

If we present horticulture as little more than gardening, mowing, pruning and maintaining landscapes, we shouldn’t be terribly surprised if a young person interested in science, technology, climate, biodiversity or human wellbeing looks elsewhere.

Not because there is anything wrong with gardening — far from it.

But horticulture is so much more.

Today’s horticulturist may work with plant and soil science, urban greening, food production, biodiversity, water management, biosecurity, therapeutic horticulture, technology, protected cropping, nursery production, landscape systems or climate adaptation.

We are increasingly asking plants to help cool our cities, manage water, provide food, support biodiversity, improve human wellbeing and make increasingly dense urban environments pleasant places in which to live.

Someone has to understand how those plants actually live.

And that requires considerably more than putting a green dot on a development plan.

Plants haven’t read the plan

Technology is transforming horticulture, and rightly so.

We now have sensors, automation, digital mapping, sophisticated irrigation systems and artificial intelligence capable of assisting with everything from monitoring to pattern recognition.

Wonderful tools.

But a sensor can tell us that something has changed. It still takes knowledge to decide whether the result makes biological sense, why it happened and what we should do about it.

AI may recognise a pattern on a leaf, but the horticulturist still needs to consider the plant, its roots, soil structure, water, nutrients, heat, exposure, disease, insects and what happened to it six months ago.

Plants have an irritating habit of responding to the whole environment rather than the particular problem we would like them to have.

That is why I remain passionate about protecting the fundamentals: plant identification, whole-plant knowledge, soils, water, plant health and the ability to observe.

Technology should build upon horticultural knowledge, not replace it.

Where exactly does a horticultural career lead?

This is where I think our profession has made life unnecessarily difficult for young people.

Ask someone interested in becoming a landscape architect to find a university pathway and they can find clearly named degrees and recognised professional routes.

Search simply for horticulture and the picture becomes much less obvious.

Yet the knowledge is still there.

My research found horticulture and substantial horticultural knowledge being taught through agricultural science, plant and soil science, environmental science, vegetation and landscape studies, plant science, urban horticulture and other programs around Australia.

In other words, horticulture hasn’t necessarily disappeared.

We have sometimes made it rather difficult to find.

That matters.

A young person should be able to see that a Certificate III is not the end of a horticultural career. It may be the beginning.

From there can come specialist technical practice, advanced vocational education, management, consulting, education, research, business ownership, professional recognition, policy and leadership.

There is no single ladder and nor should there be.

But we could at least show people where some of the rungs are.

And then there is the knowledge we can’t Google

I am a great believer in mentoring.

After nearly five decades in horticulture, I have accumulated a considerable amount of knowledge — including a useful collection of things I learnt by getting them wrong!

That knowledge matters too.

Experienced horticulturists carry memories of seasons, plants, soils, sites, clients, successes, failures and consequences that sometimes only become apparent 10 or 20 years later.

Young horticulturists bring something equally important: new technology, different education, fresh expectations and questions that some of us may not have thought to ask.

That is why I don’t see mentoring as the older person dispensing wisdom while the younger person sits obediently taking notes.

The learning should travel in both directions.

A profession that doesn’t pass knowledge between generations eventually spends a great deal of time rediscovering things it once knew.

What does society actually need from a horticulturist?

This, for me, is the bigger question.

Healthy communities need plants and living landscapes.

We need people who understand how to establish trees that will still be providing canopy decades from now.

We need people who understand soils rather than treating them merely as something underneath a landscape.

We need people who understand plant health, water, biodiversity, food production and biosecurity.

And increasingly, we need horticulturists who understand that their decisions have consequences for people and Country well beyond the immediate project.

Young people entering horticulture today will live with the consequences of many of the decisions we are making now.

Perhaps they are entitled to expect us to leave them a profession capable of dealing with those consequences.

So perhaps we have been asking the wrong question

Rather than asking:

“How do we get young people into horticulture?”

perhaps we should ask:

“How do we build a horticultural profession worthy of their skills, curiosity and future responsibility?”

That changes the conversation.

We are no longer asking young people to come and rescue an ageing industry.

We are inviting them into a profession concerned with some of the most fundamental things human societies depend upon — plants, soils, water and healthy living systems.

And once they arrive, our job is not simply to teach them what we know.

It is to give them the foundations, professional pathways and confidence to take that knowledge somewhere we haven’t been yet.

That, I think, is a much more interesting invitation.

Looking for a Horticulture Career? Look Beyond the Word ‘Horticulture’

One of the difficulties for someone considering a horticultural career is knowing where to look. Horticultural knowledge is taught across Australian universities and training providers, but the word horticulture does not always appear in the course title. 

Plant science, soil science, environmental science, agricultural science and vegetation studies can all provide pathways into parts of the broader horticultural profession.