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 horticulture classes cater to anyone—from beginners to advanced horticulturists—with an emphasis on real world skill-building. 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 individuals.
Student Testimonial
I was drawn to NYBG’s Horticulture Program because there are things that you can only know when your hands and your back and your feet and your skin know it. This entire 250 acres was my classroom. This program is fast but it’s not diluted. It’s concentrated and full of nuance and precision. I studied rigorous, respected theory, history, and biology. I’m now a student of plants, which are really much wiser and more sophisticated than us. I’m in a better position to help conserve, document, and celebrate the links between biological and cultural diversity wherever I land professionally. And I’m certainly a better human being.
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.
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!