Horticulturist Overview

A career in horticulture is your best bet if you love being closer to nature - plants, fruits, flowers and what have you. If gardening is your favourite past time you can now extend it as a career and develop virus resistant potatoes, or simply increase the yield of your favourite fruit. 

 

Horticulture is the science and art of producing nutritious food for the body - fruits, nut and vegetable crops - and beautiful food for the soul - flowers, ornamental plants and lawns. It trains students in many aspects of plant science-physiology, nutrition, identification, soils, disease and insect control. If you choose to be a horticulturist you could even try your hand at landscaping. Creative horticulturists are needed to design and plan interior and exterior landscapes for homes, office buildings, parks, campuses and golf courses. 

 

The four main specialties in horticulture include:

 

Pomology: Cultivation of fruits, shrubs and vines.

 

Olericulture: Plants raised for use as vegetables.

 

Floriculture: Production and use of flowering and foliage plants.

 

Ornamental Horticulture: Plants grown outdoors for landscaping.

You'll be involved in everything - creating and maintaining horticultural and floriculture farms, parks and gardens, plant pathology, fruit and vegetable processing, preservation and marketing of fruits, vegetables and flowers, etc. You will also manage and supervise agricultural practices and maximise yields. 

 

The main areas of work in horticulture are:

 

Farming - Here you'll work on soil preparation, sowing, harvesting, testing and usage of fertilisers and nutrients, scientific management of the environment, etc. Mind you this is not a cushy job. You'll have to get your hands dirty, literally. It's a lot of physical labour and as such not for everyone. 

 

Gardening - Here you'll take care of flowers, trees, shrubs, ornamental trees, etc. Grafting, collecting seeds, de-budding, etc. also fall under gardening.

 

Processing - Your main aim is to increase the shelf life of food items. It's a detailed process that starts from the raw material to the final distribution of the end products (which is either packaged or kept in the original form).

 

Research - This involves investigating and creating new and improved varieties of flowers, fruits and vegetables with the help of state-of-the-art machines and techniques like the tissue culture, embryo culture, micro-propagation. You'll work mainly at the government-funded research institutions as well as research and development laboratories owned by private sector companies (that handle the processing and marketing of horticultural foods). 

 

Teaching/Advisory Arena - You could be teach in colleges and universities or take up an advisory position in a company. 

 

Here is a list of science colleges in India

 

If you need more information on how to reach your goal feel free to contact us Now.