Horticulture Classes
Discover a new career path in horticulture.
During our horticulture classes, develop the vital skills needed to protect and manage landscapes, maintain healthy trees, design attractive gardens, and produce landscape plants. Our students start their own businesses or pursue rewarding careers in a breadth of areas, including landscaping companies, nurseries and garden centers, public parks, botanical gardens, and private estates. Enroll in a single class or pursue a Horticulture Certificate.
The NYBG Horticulture Certificate Program blends classroom theory with field studies in the Garden’s historic landscape, teaching students how to form and care for healthy, sustainable landscapes. Horticulture classes are designed and taught by landscape professionals, botanists, and practicing horticulturists. The program offers a high standard of training in four areas of concentration:
- Track 1: Plant Production Gain the skills to propagate and produce an array of native and non-native plants for nurseries, garden centers, and landscape restoration projects.
- Track 2: Sustainable Landscape Management Understand landscape maintenance and management practices using the concept “right plant—right place” in residential and commercial landscapes.
- Track 3: Arboriculture Know how to grow, prune, care for, and manage trees in parks, residential sites, and urban environments.
- Track 4: Sustainable Garden Design Be able to design small-scale gardens for homes, communities, and private clients.
Student Testimonial
A (very) amateur gardener for years, I decided to have a go at a career in horticulture, and enrolled in NYBG’s Sustainable Garden Design Certificate Program. There I found a staff of working professionals who blend theory, their experiences, and an unrivaled outdoor classroom into a solid foundation for professional gardening. The program has equipped me well for both my work as an urban gardener in New York and as a designer with a taste for more rural settings. And every bit of it is fun.
Tim Nolan
2018 Graduate, Lead Gardener, Folia Gardens
The Sustainable Garden Design Track in Horticulture gave me a solid foothold to begin mastering the rigorous art of horticulture. Since graduating, I’ve confidently expanded my garden design business, knowing that I have the latest knowledge in the trade…and that I’m able to speak botanical Latin a whole lot better!