Garden Club Benefits from Customized Curriculum

Posted in Learning Experiences on May 28 2009, by Plant Talk

Education Courses Tailor-Made for Groups

Jeff Downing is Vice President for Education.

The first time I spoke with Ellen Conrad it was a long phone call. Not in a bad way—there was just a lot to say.

Ellen is the President of the Bedford Garden Club in Westchester County. She called looking for ways to provide high-quality educational content for her club members. With over 500 different courses offered for adults, I assured her that The New York Botanical Garden was certainly a good place to start. I explained that our 300-plus instructors included many of the Garden’s own staff—the world-class horticulturists who bring to life the stunning exhibitions and who care for the collections—in addition to a wide range of professional nurserymen and women, landscape designers, arborists, gardening authors, and others. All have both the knowledge of plant care and the ability to convey these skills in a classroom/workshop environment.

“But that’s just background!” I said. I was getting warmed up.

The Garden had never before customized a curriculum for a Garden Club (at least not in the 10 years I’ve been here), but for some time I had been contemplating the feasibility of such an arrangement. With the array of educational content, instructors, facilities, and resources available, the Garden could ostensibly design a customized curriculum to meet a group’s specific needs, schedule the classes around the group’s availability, and deliver a one-of-a-kind educational experience. All the Bedford Garden Club would need to do is get at least 15 of its members to enroll in the class—“to make it worth the investment of time to develop and schedule a specialized program like this,” I explained. “If you give me 15 students, I can teach you whatever you want. I mean, I could teach you Latin…OK, Botanical Latin, but you get the idea.”

“Wow!” Ellen exclaimed. Now she was as excited as I was. From there the conversation exploded into a dizzying back-and-forth of scheduling concepts, programming ideas, and possible follow-up opportunities down the road if the first course went well.

That was almost a year ago. Since then, the Garden has worked closely with the Bedford Garden Club to devise a tailored curriculum around essential horticulture principles within a schedule that accommodated their needs. Todd Forrest, the Garden’s Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections, arranged a number of unique Curator-led workshops and special behind-the-scenes tours of Garden exhibitions, including The Orchid Show. When the eight-session course was offered last fall and winter, more than 20 club members participated and were enthusiastic about the results.

I saw Ellen Conrad a few weeks ago. I asked her whether the participants had any further thoughts now that they’ve had time to digest and reflect on the experience. “Sure,” she replied. “What’s next?”

To learn more about tailoring a curriculum for your garden club or interested group, contact Duncan Himmelman at 718.817.8741 or dhimmelman@nybg.org.