The Garden Coach, Part One
I blog with a group of opinionated gardeners at gardenrant.com; one of my partners in crime on that site makes her living as a garden coach. At first I wasn't sure why the world needed one more kind of horticultural professional. We already have designers, landscape architects, arborists, engineers, lawn care services, and landscape crews to choose from. But Susan’s stories about her fledgling garden coach career fascinated me. A movie star who spends most of his time in New York asked her to go to his mother's house in the DC area a couple times a month and just garden alongside her, to encourage her interest in the outdoors and to help with the heavy lifting. Gardeners who had spent years filling their yard with plants felt frustrated with the results and called on Susan to help them rearrange and fine-tune.
Pretty soon the media was calling too, and Susan was talking to reporters all over the country about garden coaching. She didn't invent the concept, but she just happened to have a website (thegardeningcoach.com) that attracted reporters. One day I was reading about Susan in the Christian Science Monitor, and there was a quote from Genevieve Schmidt, a garden coach in Arcata. I had met Genevieve a couple of times—she created a lovely woodland garden for a friend of mine -- so I invited her over to talk about why, exactly, a gardener might want to hire a coach.














