Rotation Descriptions
Students are engaged in one elective and seven required horticulture rotations during the first year for hands-on training. The following chart depicts the rotation areas and skills learned. Each rotation is approximately 100 hours long.
Skills Tests
At the end of each rotation, students are evaluated and tested on their mastery of horticultural skills covered in the rotation, such as tree and shrub planting, seed and cutting propagation, pruning, herbaceous perennial maintenance, and fertilization techniques.
Required:
| Rotation | Skills Learned and Utilized | Location |
| Arboriculture | Safe, appropriate methods to climb trees for maintenance purposes. Trimming large hedges using platforms. Pruning techniques. | Throughout the Garden grounds |
| Conservatory | How to plant for indoor displays. Maintenance of conservatory plants: grooming, watering, syringing, misting, soil preparation, and amending. Specific culture for succulents and cacti, aquatics, tropicals, and/or others. | Enid A. Haupt Conservatory |
| Display Gardens | How to plant for display purposes–spacing, grooming, weeding, watering, edging and staking. | Home Gardening Center Everett Children’s Adventure Garden Jane Watson Irwin Perennial Garden |
| Greenhouse Production | Control systems: heating, cooling, humidity, shade, and ventilation. Basic operations: fertilizing, soil mixture preparations, repotting plants, pricking, transplanting. Crop production: forcing, growing annuals, and container growing. | Nolen Greenhouses for Living Collections |
| Plant Health Care | Diagnose, monitor, and apply thresholds for various pest; interpret monitoring results; and discuss possible control actions. | Throughout the Garden grounds, Conservatory, and Nolen Greenhouses |
| Plant Records | Plant identification, data entry, label design and production, accessioning and de-accessioning, collection inventory, label information for shows, research, and composition. | Plant Records |
| Turfs and Grounds | Maintenance of turf areas: irrigation methods, edging techniques, fertilizing (equipment and type of fertilizer), weed control, leaf-raking, and blowing. | Throughout the Garden grounds |
Elective:
| Rotation | Skills Learned and Utilized | Location |
| Bronx Green-Up | Community outreach and involvement, improvement of community gardens, and putting into practice horticultural skills. | Throughout the Bronx |
| Family Garden | Learn how to plan, install, maintain gardens, growing vegetables, cut flowers, perennials, meadow/wild flowers, containers, working with volunteers and families. | Family Garden |
| Forest Restoration | Management of invasive exotic species, forest restoration (weeding, trail maintenance, seed collecting, and plant production), and active research. | Native Forest |
| Mapping | Mapping and map reading, survey techniques and equipment operation, fundamentals of AutoCAD and GIS, and construction stakeout. | Lionel Goldfrank III Institutional Mapping Department |
| Rock and Native Plant Culture | Cultivation of rock garden and native plants that require very specific conditions. | Rock and Native Plant Garden |
| Rose Culture | Maintenance of a rose collection: grooming, hilling, watering, deadheading, winter pruning, overwintering, pruning of different types of roses. | Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden |