A gardener is someone who practices
gardening, either professionally or as a
hobby
A hobby is considered to be a regular activity that is done for enjoyment, typically during one's leisure time. Hobbies include collecting themed items and objects, engaging in creative and artistic pursuits, playing sports, or pursuing oth ...
.
Description
A gardener is any person involved in gardening, arguably the oldest occupation, from the
hobby
A hobby is considered to be a regular activity that is done for enjoyment, typically during one's leisure time. Hobbies include collecting themed items and objects, engaging in creative and artistic pursuits, playing sports, or pursuing oth ...
ist in a residential
garden
A garden is a planned space, usually outdoors, set aside for the cultivation, display, and enjoyment of plants and other forms of nature. The single feature identifying even the wildest wild garden is ''control''. The garden can incorporate bot ...
, the home-owner supplementing the family food with a small
vegetable garden or
orchard
An orchard is an intentional plantation of trees or shrubs that is maintained for food production. Orchards comprise fruit- or nut-producing trees which are generally grown for commercial production. Orchards are also sometimes a feature of ...
, to an employee in a
plant nursery
A nursery is a place where plants are propagated and grown to a desired size. Mostly the plants concerned are for gardening, forestry or conservation biology, rather than agriculture. They include retail nurseries, which sell to the general p ...
or the
head gardener in a
large estate.
Garden design and maintenance
The
garden designer
A garden designer is someone who designs the plan and features of gardens, either as an amateur or professional. The compositional elements of garden design and landscape design are: terrain, water, planting, constructed elements and buildings, ...
is someone who will design the garden, and the gardener is the person who will undertake the work to produce the desired outcome.
Design
The term gardener is also used to describe garden designers and
landscape architects, who are involved chiefly in the design of gardens, rather than the practical aspects of horticulture.
Garden design
Garden design is the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Garden design may be done by the garden owner themselves, or by professionals of varying levels of experience and expertise. ...
is considered to be an art in most cultures, distinguished from gardening, which generally means ''garden maintenance''.
Vita Sackville-West,
Gertrude Jekyll and
William Robinson were garden designers as well as gardeners.
Garden design is the creation of a plan for the construction of a garden, in a design process. The product is the garden, and the garden designers attempt to optimize the given general conditions of the soil, location and
climate
Climate is the long-term weather pattern in an area, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorologi ...
, ecological, and geological conditions and processes to choose the right plants in corresponding conditions. The design can include different themes such as perennial,
butterfly
Butterflies are insects in the macrolepidopteran clade Rhopalocera from the order Lepidoptera, which also includes moths. Adult butterflies have large, often brightly coloured wings, and conspicuous, fluttering flight. The group comprise ...
,
wildlife
Wildlife refers to undomesticated animal species, but has come to include all organisms that grow or live wild in an area without being introduced by humans. Wildlife was also synonymous to game: those birds and mammals that were hunted ...
,
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
,
water
Water (chemical formula ) is an Inorganic compound, inorganic, transparent, tasteless, odorless, and Color of water, nearly colorless chemical substance, which is the main constituent of Earth's hydrosphere and the fluids of all known living ...
,
tropical
The tropics are the regions of Earth surrounding the Equator. They are defined in latitude by the Tropic of Cancer in the Northern Hemisphere at N and the Tropic of Capricorn in
the Southern Hemisphere at S. The tropics are also referred to ...
, or
shade gardens. In 18th-century Europe, country estates were refashioned by landscape gardeners into
formal gardens
Garden design is the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Garden design may be done by the garden owner themselves, or by professionals of varying levels of experience and expertise. ...
or landscaped park lands, such as at
Versailles
The Palace of Versailles ( ; french: Château de Versailles ) is a former royal residence built by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about west of Paris, France. The palace is owned by the French Republic and since 1995 has been managed, ...
, France, or
Stowe Gardens, England.
Today, landscape architects and garden designers continue to design both private garden spaces, residential estates and parkland, public parks and parkways to site planning for campuses and corporate office parks. Professional landscape designers are certified by the
Association of Professional Landscape Designers.
Maintenance
The designer also provides directions and supervision during construction, and the management of establishment and maintenance once the garden has been created. The gardener is the person who has the skill to maintain the garden's design.
The gardener's labor during the year include planting flowers and other plants,
weeding
Weed control is a type of pest control, which attempts to stop or reduce growth of weeds, especially noxious weeds, with the aim of reducing their competition with desired flora and fauna including domesticated plants and livestock, and in natu ...
,
pruning
Pruning is a horticultural, arboricultural, and silvicultural practice involving the selective removal of certain parts of a plant, such as branches, buds, or roots.
The practice entails the ''targeted'' removal of diseased, damaged, dead, ...
,
grafting,
deadheading, mixing and preparation of
insecticides
Insecticides are substances used to kill insects. They include ovicides and larvicides used against insect eggs and larvae, respectively. Insecticides are used in agriculture, medicine, industry and by consumers. Insecticides are claimed t ...
and other products for
pest control
Pest control is the regulation or management of a species defined as a pest; any animal, plant or fungus that impacts adversely on human activities or environment. The human response depends on the importance of the damage done and will range ...
, and tending garden
compost. Weeds tend to thrive at the expense of the more refined
edible
An edible item is any item that is safe for humans to eat. "Edible" is differentiated from "eatable" because it does not indicate how an item tastes, only whether it is fit to be eaten. Nonpoisonous items found in nature – such as some mushroo ...
or
ornamental plant
Ornamental plants or garden plants are plants that are primarily grown for their beauty but also for qualities such as scent or how they shape physical space. Many flowering plants and garden varieties tend to be specially bred cultivars that ...
s. Gardeners need to
control weeds using physical or
chemical
A chemical substance is a form of matter having constant chemical composition and characteristic properties. Some references add that chemical substance cannot be separated into its constituent elements by physical separation methods, i.e., w ...
methods to stop weeds from reaching a mature stage of growth when they could be harmful to domesticated plants. Early activities such as starting young plants from seeds for later
transplantation are usually performed in early spring.
See also
*
History of gardening
The early history of gardening is largely entangled with the history of agriculture, with gardens that were mainly ornamental generally the preserve of the elite until quite recent times. Smaller gardens generally had being a kitchen garden as t ...
*
Landscape architecture
*
Celebrity gardener
*
List of professional gardeners
*
Garden centre
A garden centre (Commonwealth English spelling; U.S. nursery or garden center) is a retail operation that sells plants and related products for the domestic garden as its primary business.
It is a development from the concept of the retail plant n ...
*
Flower garden
A flower garden or floral garden is any garden or part of a garden where plants that flower are grown and displayed. This normally refers mostly to herbaceous plants, rather than flowering woody plants, which dominate in the shrubbery and ...
*
Order of Free Gardeners
The Order of Free Gardeners is a fraternal society that was founded in Scotland in the middle of the 17th century and later spread to England and Ireland. Like numerous other friendly societies of the time, its principal aim was the sharing of ...
References
{{Authority control
Horticulturists