National Botanic Garden

The National Botanic Garden of Wales offers a maximum of four horticultural studentships a year, aimed at horticulture students who require a period of work experience as part of their course. Recently qualified horticulture students who feel they will benefit from additional work experience are also considered. We offer all our students a structur... ed programme, rotating each one around the various areas of the gardens. Students generally spend three months working alongside our permanent staff in the ornamental areas of the gardens (the herbaceous borders, bog garden and parkland areas), three months in the Great Glasshouse (devoted to an internationally important collection of Mediterranean climate plants), three months in the nursery glasshouses, tropical display house and outside nursery areas (learning propagation techniques and the maintenance of plants in containers), and three months in our Walled Garden (with its displays of flowering plant evolution, and of traditional vegetable production). Over the year, we expect them to gain experience of a very wide range of horticultural techniques and skills, from the basics of weeding, grass maintenance and hedge trimming to the more advanced skills of propagating from cuttings and seed, planting and pruning and so on. As a relatively new garden, we feel we offer an exciting and challenging experience. Students who spend a year with us have a chance to get involved in the development of new areas, as well as the maintenance of existing ones. As a garden with a small staff (in terms of the acreage we are expected to maintain) our students get to take on more responsibility and to be more involved in decision-making than they would be in many other gardens. As well as the work experience we offer, we encourage our students to apply for and attend courses and garden visits organised by bodies such as PlantNetwork and the Professional Gardeners Guild; several of our past students have profited from the proximity of our local agricultural/horticultural college to ...Read More