The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) is the largest botanical garden in any city in the U.S. and is known as a national historic landmark. Founded in 1981 and nestled in the Bronx, the garden is an expansive, 250-acre living museum with over one million different trees, flowers, and other plants. NYBG has always made education a priority, aiming to get the public interested and involved in the fascinating world of horticulture. As a result, the Continuing Education program was created for adults who wished to either create a new hobby or explore a career related to horticulture or landscaping. Jeffrey Downing, vice president of education, manages NYBG’s educational departments and was happy to share more about the program and the variety of courses offered. Visit conted.nybg.org for more information.
When did the NYBG begin its Continuing Education program and what does the program hope to achieve?
The Botanical Garden has been offering courses for adults since 1917. It started with classes teaching general gardening to homeowners and gardening with children in schools for schoolteachers. It’s a very broad program so there are many aims. For many of the courses, the goal is to share information and educate people about things of personal interest like home gardening, basic botany, or floral design. For many of the programs there is also a career-oriented, vocational track, and those programs generally comprise our horticulture certificate, landscape design certificate, horticultural therapy certificate, and our floral design certificate.
How does the NYBG strive to get people interested in their continuing education courses? What are some of the more popular fields of study?
One way is through direct-mail, and we send postcards out to targeted lists of people letting them know about the program. We’re shifting more to online and email marketing because it’s becoming more effective and because it’s more sustainable. Our most popular courses are our basic gardening and horticulture classes, our floral design introductory classes, such as our basic centerpieces class (because people get to go home with beautiful centerpieces after every class), and botanical art courses.
What exactly is horticultural therapy and what is the demand for these practices? Has demand grown in recent years and if so, why?
Horticultural therapy is the use of plants in a therapeutic setting, and it is akin to things like recreational therapy or music therapy, where people use a certain context for therapeutic means. In horticultural therapy, facilitators work with client in various situations, such as people with physical disabilities, mental disabilities, incarcerated populations, and using plants seems to help them work through issues and engage in the physical world around them in ways that can help them recover or improve themselves.
I think demand for horticultural therapy has definitely grown. When I first got to the Garden, which was about 10 years ago, horticultural therapy had already been around from some 30 years, and the program started in the mid-1970s. But it’s still in its growth phase, so 10 years ago people would go through the program and they would have to essentially convince others to start horticultural therapy programs in health care or school settings where they worked or wanted to work. But there weren’t too many actual job postings per se, on our job board. But in the past 10 years we have seen a significant increase in the number of positions that are available and existing, and the number of people looking for professionals that can perform horticultural therapy.
Are there any fields of study that you believe have grown more popular due to the public’s interest in the green movement?
Horticultural and landscape design courses have become particularly popular due the interest in sustainability and people’s interest in having careers that are oriented towards taking better care of the earth, things that people can feel good about doing. The interest in designing landscapes that can be sustainable, less toxic, and better for the environment has been a real growth field. That has been great, because for as long as I’ve been here I’ve heard our horticulture staff and horticulture professionals from around the country really bemoan the lack of skilled horticulturalists. There has been this demand that has gone unfilled for many years.
How does the Continuing Education program make itself more available to those with busy schedules or who live farther away from the NYBG?
There are a few ways. We try to offer classes in as many different time slots as possible, so we try to offer classes in the evening, on weekends, or during the day to meet the needs of people with varied schedules. We also have off-site classes in order to make them more accessible to those who don’t live here in the Bronx. We offer classes in Manhattan, in New Canaan, Greenwich, Connecticut, the east end of Long Island, and upstate at Bard College, so we try to reach out to more geographic locations.
Are there any classes that you are developing or hope to offer in the future?
We are very proactively expanding the number of courses we have that deal directly with issues of sustainability, particularly how it pertains to urban and suburban environments. People living in cities want to know what they can do to be more sustainable, and people who live in the suburbs are equally concerned with finding ways to garden and ways to live and care for the land that are healthier for everyone.
What do students of the program go on to achieve after they complete their course or courses?
They go on either to work for companies that engage in things such as nurseries or landscape design, and also landscape building and maintenance firms. And they go on to do many different kinds of things, and that’s the main reason why we began having career information sessions a year ago. I would see these people who would come back for a class or I’d see them out at a conference, and they would tell me all these wonderful things that they’re doing, and I thought it would be great if we could share their experience with other students and potential students so that they would have a real-world sense of what its like to go through the program and what it’s like on the other side.
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