Tuesday, October 9, 2007

A word by any other name

A word by any other name.

Garden Coaching or is it Horticultural Consultation ?

A client calls you and asks for you to come to their property to advise them in how to manage the horticultural needs of their garden.

You walk the property with the homeowner and if they have one, their maintenance gardener .
You take photographs, you write notes, you identify their pruning , fertilizing and disease control needs.
You show them how to properly cut back their rose bushes , tip prune their thinning jasmine vine and divide their orchid collection.
On occasion you pull a core sample of soil and bag it for testing, trouble shoot and reprogram the automatic irrigation timer, and if a specific disease baffles you on site you take a cutting sample and take it back to your office for further microscopic inspection and indepth research.
You follow up with a written report . Make two copies if you are working with a homeowner who has a maintenance gardener . Provide the client with a binder with the first report so that all the subsequent reports can be saved in the main ‘bible binder’.

You develop a relationship.

Below is one photograph of a section of a large estate garden that I have been doing the horticultural consultation for , on and off , for the past 10 years


A sample of a report :

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I should hire you to tell me what to plant on the north side of the house.

But then I'd never get to kill so many plants....

Deviant Deziner, aka Michelle said...

Max,
my mantra : " been there , killed that !

keep on planting !
michelle