Where do graduates of horticultural colleges find work in the gardening world, especially in a tight job market like today’s?
Well, municipal parks departments are still one of the biggest employers of professional-trained horticulturalists.
Arborists are always needed to prune and care for street trees, and city parks and boulevards still have to planted and maintained throughout the year.
Golf courses are another major employer of graduates with turf-management skills and nowadays many courses pride themselves on having flower and shrub borders that look attractive year round.
Garden centres are increasingly focused on hiring staff with plant knowledge and gardening expertise, as well as excellent marketing and communication skills.
The GardenWorks chain, with a total of six stores — two in Burnaby, one in North Vancouver and three in the Victoria area — is one of the biggest garden retail employers.
The Nurseryland chain is a buying group comprising 80 independent garden centres across Canada, 40 of which are members and 40 are associate members that participate in the buying process in order to keep prices down.
Other popular garden centres that have achieved an instantly recognizable brand include the Art Knapps and David Hunter chains, and there are numerous others, such as Dykof’s in North Vancouver, Amsterdam Greenhouses in Pitt Meadows and Triple Tree in Maple Ridge, that have been serving gardeners for years and have many professionally trained people working for them.
Home improvement stores like Home Depot and Revy also have large garden centres.
B.C.’s top wholesale nurseries — responsible for growing all the plants the gardening public are looking for — are scattered all over the province, but there is a concentration of them in the Fraser Valley.
In Abbotsford, there’s Valleybrook Gardens, one of Canada’s biggest perennial growers, as well as the long-established Kato’s Nursery and Van Belle Nursery, which has introduced an innovative Bloomin’ Easy marketing program featuring foolproof shrubs.
In Langley, key nurseries include Dutch bulb suppliers and plant growers Van Noort; Clearview Horticulture, the biggest clematis nursery in Western Canada; Devry Greenhouses, which specializes in growing bedding plants; and Darvonda, well known for the flower crops it produces for Costco, such as poinsettia and cushion chrysanthemums.
Burnaby Lake Greenhouse, of Surrey, is one of the biggest operations with more than 1.8 million square feet of growing capacity and is one of the top suppliers of cactus, succulents and houseplants for florists.
In Maple Ridge, Rainbow Nursery specializes in container-grown roses, spirea, hydrangeas and potentilla.
In the Okanagan, Bylands Nursery in Kelowna has set industry standards with its growing of hardy shrubs and trees and has a well-established track record for growing and marketing top-notch plants.
There are many other nurseries employing greenhouse horticulturists, trained to handle propagation, pest management and general plant marketing and shipping.
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