Anne Meore is a graduate of Continuing Education’s Horticultural Therapy program and has her own horticultural therapy consulting business, Planthropy, LLC.

It’s not always easy to see where you are going when on the proverbial “career path.” At times the path tends to be longer than expected and sometimes a bit bumpy. At age 44, I can finally look back with a bit of clarity and see how I finally made it to today.

With advanced degrees in Elementary Education, Psychology, Counseling, and Social Work, I’ve had the opportunity over the years to work with various populations, each with differing needs and more than I could adequately provide for, especially from behind a desk.

But that’s where it began for me. During counseling sessions, something would happen when we fiddled with the plant on my desk, listened to the sounds of birds, smelled the fresh air through the screen, and watched as Mother Nature danced outside the office window. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what made it work, but I knew it did work. So I began conducting sessions outdoors in the natural world. A novel idea, I thought. I think I will call this therapeutic milieu “horticultural therapy.”

It wasn’t until I received the Continuing Education catalog that I discovered that horticultural therapy wasn’t my invention after all. How naive of me to try to take credit for a field that has been in existence since the time of Egyptian civilization.

I enrolled in Introduction to Horticultural Therapy and was led through the historical background, foundations, and applications of this field by Katherine Sabatino. An experienced horticultural therapist, she was able to take years of personal contemplation and tie it up in a nice big bow for me. My decision was made, my career path defined, with all arrows pointing toward horticultural therapy.

The instructional staff facilitated my learning process throughout the course of study. The expertise and experience of these very people are what distinguishes NYBG’s program from others.

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