How Much Gardening Experience Does a Garden Consultant Need?

You Don’t Need a PhD in Horticulture to Do Gardening as a Job

Unless you hold advanced degrees in botany or horticulture or landscape design, you’ve probably doubted whether you even know enough yet about gardening to work as a garden consultant, start a garden business, or tell other people what to do in their outdoor spaces, let alone charge for it. 

I’ve heard so many people say, "Oh, I would love to grow a garden consultant business like yours, but I just don't have enough experience yet.” 

My grandfather was the head of horticulture at Mississippi State University. He was giving me a tour of the university’s peach tree orchards one day, long after he had retired, when he told me, “Nicole, I have a PhD in horticulture. I've devoted my entire life to the garden. And I still don't know everything about plants. I'm literally learning more every single day, even in my retirement.”

If you're interested in working as a garden consultant, listen to my wise granddad and let yourself off the hook; you don’t have to know everything about plants or gardening. 

Isn’t that freeing? 

You can actually grow a wildly successful gardening business and not know everything about gardening. I know this because I did (start a successful gardening business) but I still don't (know everything about gardening). Let me explain.

Work with the Gardening Experience You Have

When I first started my Houston-based company, Rooted Garden, I was, by no stretch of the imagination, a pro at everything having to do with the garden. I would not have checked all the boxes if there were a gardening job description with high requirements. I had, however, come off several years of successfully growing my own salad greens for six months out of the year. My family of six got to harvest greens from our own backyard from October to March, skipping all those plastic bags and boxes in the grocery store. 

I was so excited to share my knowledge of salad gardening, and I knew that I could teach others how to set up, plant, tend, and harvest their own salad gardens.

Look at it this way: In high school, you do everything for the first time as a freshman. Then you become a sophomore. You're still not at senior level; you haven't mastered every single aspect of high school yet, but you have figured out how to be a freshman. Seniors have become so removed from their own freshman years that they've forgotten what it was like, but for sophomores, their memories are fresh. That makes sophomores the most qualified students to help freshmen through the challenges they're facing.

As a garden consultant, all you need to be is the sophomore. You just need to be one chapter ahead of your students in the textbook. 

What makes someone a great teacher is not how many degrees they have or how many certifications beyond their PhD. No. What makes someone a great teacher is their ability to empathize with the students and understand what they're going through.

I think a lot of us fool ourselves into thinking we need to be at a certain level before we can be a good coach or a teacher, when we really need to be as close to the experience of our students as possible. We should be like freshmen in our constant desire to develop new skills, acquire new assets, and add to our tool kit. The more we embrace the fact that we are continually learning, the better we’re able to turn around and give our knowledge to other people. 

Both Intermediates and Gardening Experts Can Teach Beginners

Instead of burning all our mental energy waiting to feel accomplished enough, we can instead be putting that energy toward turning our knowledge into systems to pass along to students and make them feel accomplished—that's what coaches and consultants do.

Garden consultants of all levels must turn their knowledge—however extensive it is—into easily digestible lessons to deliver to their students. They must simplify the process of learning to garden, and this can actually be more complicated for advanced gardeners to do than those with less experience. The more knowledge you have on a topic, the harder it can be to boil it down to just the parts a newbie should learn.

I call these easily digestible lessons systems of knowledge, and you can build systems of knowledge for almost any area of the garden. Like I said, the first system I built was for salad gardening. I broke down how to grow your own lettuce plants into a few steps, and then I taught that step-by-step method to my students. 

Once you've decided what you're going to teach and you've developed a system to teach it, you just have to find a way to distribute it. Maybe you'll teach one on one, or maybe you'll teach your methods to a larger group. There are so many different ways you can do it, and none of those ways requires much setup because what you’re selling is your knowledge, your experience, your understanding of best practices. 

Remember, you only need to be a sophomore to charge for your guidance and provide value to your freshman clients. The sooner you recognize that, the more confidence you'll have moving forward as a garden consultant.

Garden Consulting Is Unique to Each Individual and Location

It's not your level of gardening experience that will allow you to build a successful business. There are two other far more important factors.

The first factor is you as an individual. What kind of teacher will you be? When creating a knowledge-based business, it’s critical to understand the value that you yourself can bring to your students. You might look at another successful knowledge-based business and be tempted to copy exactly how that person presents themselves, but I’ve found that when you instead focus on what makes you special, that’s when the real magic happens. 

The special thing about owning a knowledge-based business like garden consulting is it's completely individualized. Through the Gardenary Consultant Certification, I’ve trained gardeners who live in the same city as my business, Rooted Garden. People have asked me, “Nicole, why are you doing that? You're literally training your competition!”

But I know that each garden consultant is so different from the next that we could all have businesses right alongside each other and serve different audiences based on who we are and what we offer. There are certain people whom I will never be able to reach no matter how hard I try. Another consultant, someone with a completely different background and set of experiences, might be able to reach them. 

The second factor is your location. The gardening industry is unique in the way it’s entirely dependent on location. When I lived in Houston, I was in the same zone as gardeners in California, but our gardening experiences were vastly different. 

You have a special ability to garden consult right where you live, with the people who live in your same town or city. Think about someone who lives in a completely different area; that person might have thirty years of experience on you, but they’re still not the expert on gardening in your area. 

You are. Because you have gardened in your area.

Even though my company Gardenary is now nationally known, my best clients and biggest fans are still in Houston, where I started a local gardening business. I grew my business there with local knowledge of what’s possible when in the Houston area. I didn’t care about national publicity. I cared about relationships within the community. People knew I could do the one thing I promised to do (teach them how to grow six months of their own garden-fresh salad), and that meant so much more to them than an advanced degree or a false promise that I know everything there is to know about gardening.

Don't Search for Gardener Jobs Near You - Create Your Own Gardener Job

You can learn how to start your own garden consulting company inside the Gardenary Consultant Certification. Within this community, you'll find master gardeners and people who do hold advanced degrees in botany. You'll also find people with all levels of experience, including plenty of self-taught sophomores who are helping freshmen gardeners grow.

When I first started Rooted Garden, I didn’t have time to become a master gardener or get a degree in horticulture. I didn’t have time to go back to school and get an MBA. I needed a business right then and there; I needed to make money, like, yesterday. 

Several of our GCC members did have MBAs before joining, and yet they’d never actually started a business before, at least not a practical business. Then, there are all these garden professionals, even master gardeners or people with degrees in horticulture, who don’t know the first thing about running a business. I realized that my specialty could be marrying these two things. I had a background in business and accounting, and I also knew the garden industry. 

Our goal with GCC is to not only get you set up and going in the time that you do have, but also to give you the business expertise you’d gain from business school and full training in our garden systems all in one—because a program that speaks to best business practices in this exact industry doesn’t exist anywhere else. 

All for the price of one graduate school class. 

I've taken all of the things I wish someone had taught me when I was starting my own garden consulting business, plus the things I've learned from helping others start their businesses, and I've built those things into easy-to-follow lessons inside the Gardenary Consultant Certification. You'll be supported by fellow gardeners who are just a couple steps ahead of you in starting and growing their own small businesses.

I even give you systems to help your clients learn to garden that I've developed. You can use these systems as your own plug and play—all you have to do is distribute them in a way that works for you, your teaching style, and your location.

I'm so excited to see you inside the Gardenary Consultant Certification and for you to be a part of this incredible movement we’re creating through Gardenary to make gardening an ordinary part of life for every single person!

Featured Garden Coaches

LaTasha Harrell of Aneu Harvest in Houston, Texas (visit her website)

Josh Cleveland of Spokane Garden Coach in Spokane, Washington (visit his website)

Ellen Robinson of Good to Grow Gardens in Seattle, Washington (visit her website)

Jessica Kivett of Vine Ripe Solutions in Fayetteville, Arkansas (visit her website)