Landscape Design Certificate recipient Liz Poccia addresses her fellow graduates at the June 5 ceremony.
Landscape designers play a pivotal role as society deals with the fundamental question of how our public and private land is used. Their designs improve the outdoor environments surrounding us in rural areas, urban settings, and suburban yards. At the Garden, aspiring landscape designers receive the instruction—and inspiration—they need to create those gorgeous and sustainable green spaces.
This past month, in a Garden ceremony, 14 graduates received their Landscape Design Certificates. Elizabeth Poccia, the featured student speaker at the ceremony, credits NYBG with helping her find her passion.
NYBG Landscape Design student Danielle Faustini is on a crazy mission.
Last week, she started working at a Manhattan landscape design firm, while completing freelance projects and wrapping up her education in The New York Botanical Garden’s Certificate Program in anticipation of graduation on June 7.
Faustini’s education started in last summer’s Landscape Design Summer Intensive, an expedited five-week program that covers half of all required classroom hours toward a prestigious NYBG Certificate. In one year, she finished the required 350 hours, while working full-time as a server in a restaurant and doing freelance design work on the side—hence the crazy.
“Life is short, you know?” Faustini said. “I told myself I would complete the Certificate Program within a year. It definitely wasn’t easy, but you set your mind to something, and you do it.”
Landscape Design students, Danielle Faustini and George Siriotis
Faustini and her Summer Intensive classmate George Siriotis, who also completed the Certificate Program in a year, saw the Intensive as an opportunity to jump into a new career with the support of like-minded, ambitious peers and industry-professional instructors.
Instructor Daryl Beyers demonstrates how to resolve bound roots during a container gardening lesson.
On July 14, more than 60 eager Summer Intensives students came to the Garden to begin a move toward changing their careers, learning new skills, and pursuing their passions. The Intensives are designed to accelerate training and Certification in Gardening, Floral Design, Landscape Design, Botanical Art & Illustration, and Horticultural Therapy.
Students came from as near as the tri-state area and as far as Texas to get professional training from the Garden. Some students had prior experience in these fields of study, while others were newcomers looking for a new career. This year’s students were, overwhelmingly, all on a mission to positively change their lives and the lives of others.
An NYBG graduate, John Gembecki now heads his own landscape company.
John Gembecki was going through some very tough times. Downsized after working 28 years for a major corporation, he knew he had to reinvent himself.
“How do I begin?” he kept asking himself. Then one night at a seminar offered by his local Yorktown Heights conservation board, he met Lauretta Jones, a teacher at The New York Botanical Garden, and everything fell into place.
“I took the landscape design five-week summer intensive program and it was an experience I’ll never forget,” John recounted. “It had been a long time since I had been in school and the ‘intense’ part of the program was hard to handle. But my children reminded me of all the things I told them when they wanted to give up because something was hard.”
