Landscape Design Intensive Allowed for Quick Career Change

Posted in Learning Experiences, People on May 12 2009, by Plant Talk

Jay Petrow, a former student in Continuing Education’s Landscape Design program, is owner of PetrowGardens Landscape Design. He will talk about his path to becoming a landscape designer at a free Career Information Session on Landscape Design, Floral Design, and Horticultural Therapy tomorrow, May 13, 6–8 p.m., in the Arthur and Janet Ross Lecture Hall.

I was an eight-year-old boy growing up in Forest Hills, Queens, when my parents bought a country house. The house was overrun by thickets of wisteria, poison ivy, and weeds, but I used to go out there and just hack away and try to reshape the landscape. I believe that’s where my love for working on the land originated.

When I got to college I studied the natural sciences and art. After graduating I became a magazine art director, working for Time, Sports Illustrated, and Business Week for 25 years. Eventually, I reached that age when you need to figure out what you really want to do when you grow up. I started a personal exploration and one day everything came together. I decided that landscape design was the perfect match for all of my skills, experience, and interests. I could capitalize on my design and drawing skills, my natural science education, and my love for landscaping.

I looked around for different landscape design programs and settled on the program offered by NYBG. It would be difficult to go through the program one course at a time for me since I was living in Connecticut, working in Manhattan, and had a full-time family life. So I gravitated toward the Summer Intensive program. I managed to talk my employer into letting me take all of my vacation time at once.

To learn more about Jay’s career-changing experience…

You get to know pretty quickly after starting the Summer Intensive program whether landscape design is what you want to do. You are totally immersed in the subject up to 12 hours a day, five days a week for five weeks. I found it all to be very exciting, a good group experience with a lot of fun that made time go by very fast. The program starts out with the graphic techniques needed to draft plans to communicate your design ideas. You study the history of gardens and garden styles and how to analyze a site. From there you move on to developing design ideas culminating into a final design. Another topic is construction materials and how to use them appropriately. Unique to the Summer Intensive program is that portions of it are taught on the Garden grounds if weather and the nature of the class allow, accomplished designers present their work in evening lectures, and there are field trips to other gardens. The Intensive accounts for more than half of the course hours needed for a certificate.

Within months of returning to work, I received a severance package from the magazine and started my own landscape design/build business, PetrowGardens, in Westport, Connecticut. I design residential projects around the tri-state area and have really enjoyed the transition to running my own business. My training and education at the Botanical Garden prepared me for many aspects of my new career. Most important, I learned how to show my clients, through both plan and elevation views, where I want to take their landscape. I don’t think I would have had the confidence to start a new career without taking the intensive program at NYBG.

Besides the Continuing Education program Summer Intensive sessions in Landscape Design, individual courses are also offered throughout the year.