Why we need horticulturists

By Adrian Higgins, the Washington Post's Gardening Columist

Horticulture is not a field that attracts enough young people — this is a constant lament of garden directors I meet.

For all its imagined bliss, the life of a professional gardener can be hard, stressful and anything but lucrative. It is a world of insect bites, near-heatstroke and the steady degeneration of the spinal column.

People are driven to do it because they know that, on their best days, they can take their beloved, coddled plants and turn them into art. Some artists need formaldehyde to show off their organic subjects; gardeners rely on good loam.

I believe this is an in­cred­ibly exciting time to get into horticulture for a number of reasons, namely the rise of the local food movement as well as the need for people to grow the range of plants needed for the ecological repair of our damaged Earth. Think of all the aquatic grasses and marshland plants that have been raised in recent years to try to heal the Chesapeake Bay.

But in terms of sheer artistry, the action lies most in an area known as planting design, which might be regarded as a subset of landscape design: A designer or architect lays out a garden with, say, broad flower beds or even a meadow if the property is large enough; the horticulturist skillfully paints the canvas with carefully considered plants.

This dynamic is not new — this is how fancy country house gardens were put together a century ago. The difference is that those flashy borders were driven by color, primarily flower color, and the period of display was condensed for the time the restless owner was around — in the spring in Washington, say, or summer in Bar Harbor or the English Cotswolds.

Today’s planting design practitioners have instead built on a palette of herbaceous plants — perennials and ornamental grasses — that are inherently wilder, closer to nature and richer in their form and variety. Moreover, flower color alone is not the driving ornament; rather, it is texture, line, form and an intangible but powerful sense of seasonal progression.

Click here to read more.