What Were They Doing Before They Became Garden Consultants?

Garden consulting is by no means a new industry, but it certainly is an up-and-coming one. When I started back in 2015, I had no idea it was even a thing. Sure, I knew there were landscape designers, landscape architects, landscapers, yard workers, etc. But I didn't know there were people whose main job is to tell people what to do in the gardens.

I remembering calling up one of my friends, Teresa, a fellow homeschooling mom, and telling her how excited I was to sell people lettuce from my garden. "I hate to break it to you," she said, "but I'm not really interested in buying things from your garden. What I'd love is for you to teach me how to garden like you do—something like... garden consulting."

It was a light bulb moment for me. The idea of stepping into someone's outdoor space, talking to them for an hour, and teaching them what I've learned about gardening success, that sounded like a dream job to me. And I really thought Teresa had come up with the idea. I mean, it's not exactly like gardening consulting had been thrown out there as a career option by my high school guidance counselor, you know? No one had told my young self, "Nicole, you should be a garden consultant, not an accountant."

Fortunately for those of us who love to garden and share our knowledge with others, the garden consulting industry is growing, and some of that growth is because of me. Once I grew my garden consulting business to six figures, I thought, "This is too good to be true. I gotta tell all the other gardeners!" So in 2017, I started the Gardenary Consultant Certification program so that I could teach gardeners across the country and even around the world how to start businesses like mine. To date, we've had over a thousand gardeners go through the program.

All that to say, garden consulting is definitely a thing, and it makes so much sense why it's on the rise if you think about this: We've missed several generations of gardening, especially in the US. There was no need for garden consultants 100 years ago because practically everyone knew how to grow their own food. It's just in the past couple of decades, maybe the last century, that the majority of the population lost that knowledge, myself included. My grandfather was actually a professor of horticulture, and yet I grew up not knowing one single thing about where my food came from or how to grow it.

I'd say 99% of the people in your town are in the same boat. But they have an innate desire to learn more about plants. They want to keep their iPhones and stay in the 21st century, but they also want to enjoy the satisfaction of growing a little bit of their food themselves at home.

They hire garden consultants to help them do just that.

So now that we know a little bit about why this industry is growing, let's take a look at what inspires people to become garden consultants. I want to introduce you to 10 of our wonderful Gardenary consultants from across the country and tell you what they were doing before they became garden consultants.

From Archeologist to Garden Consultant

Aerin Peak likes to say her background is in the dirt.

That is to say, she has a Masters in Historical Archaeology. She worked as an archeologist until she became a mom and was hit hard by postpartum depression. During that difficult first year with her son, she turned to the garden for the many mental and physical health benefits it offers.

After a while, people in her walkable community would stop by her house to ask her questions: "What do I do with this plant?" "How do you get your tomatoes to be so abundant?" The volume of questions made Aerin realize that her knowledge was pretty valuable. So when she heard about people working as garden consultants, she thought, "Well, that's me. I'm doing that already. I just need to charge for it."

As a certified dirt specialist, Aerin turned to the Gardenary Consultant Certification to help her with the business side of becoming a garden consultant—creating her workflows, scaling her business, and building her systems.

Now, instead of digging in the dirt for artifacts from our past, she builds soil health to create lush garden spaces for her clients to grow in the present. "I love building soil," she says. "And you have to have your soil as a foundation in the garden... By working with me, you're building your garden, you're not just planting it."

Visit Aerin at Homegrown and Harvested. She serves the Northern Virginia area and parts of Maryland.

Cybersecurity Expert by Day, Garden Consultant at Night

Since graduating from college, Richard McLaughlin has been working in a professional services firm doing cybersecurity consulting. It might seem like IT and the garden don't exactly have much in common, but Richard insists that transitioning from cybersecurity consulting to garden consulting couldn't be more natural. In essence, they're both working with clients and helping them solve their problems. The garden's problems just have to do more with actual bugs than computer ones.

He still works at his day job, but he finds garden consulting much more interesting and rewarding. Cyber security is important, he says, but "growing your own food feels like it has more of an impact, at least on an individual level." Richard is interested in the idea of our society returning to more locally grown and nutrient-dense food, which is what draws him to permaculture and food forests, and he wants his business to be a net positive for the world.

Richard's used to needing to regularly get certified for cybersecurity, so he's worked on his permaculture research certification and, of course, his Gardenary Consultant Certification. That way, he's not just some random dude who says he likes to garden, you know?

Learn more about Richard's business, Good Land Farms Garden Design, in Southeast Pennsylvania.

Corporate Lawyer to Full-Time Gardener

Before Nicole Jagielski became a garden consultant, she was working a corporate job as a full-time lawyer and feeling a bit unfulfilled. She'd grown up gardening with her mom and grandma, and then she started doing a lot more gardening during the pandemic. Time spent in the garden was her way to relax and decompress after a stressful day at work.

She wanted to find a way to make gardening even more of a focus in her life, and that's when she noticed that a lot of her friends were also trying to get into gardening but not doing very well. They were making many of the same mistakes she'd made a couple years before when she was first setting up her urban garden. "I thought that if there was a way that I could get them to be able to progress past those mistakes faster and in a more official way so that they'd listen to me, that would be amazing." 

Nicole googled “Is coaching people on how to garden a thing” and found Gardenary. Our garden consultant program helped her launch her business while she was waiting to start a new job at a law firm, and she's since moved to focus more on her consulting business. Since she's located in Chicago, she enjoys the challenge of adapting the practices she learned in the rural gardens of her childhood to more urban spaces. Nicole is helping make the idea of a garden for everyone possible, one client at a time.

Learn more about Patio Produce.

PhD Turned Florida Master Naturalist

Melissa de Céspedes, PhD FMN, of Florida Good Life in Tampa, Florida

Before she became a garden consultant, Melissa de Céspedes was in academia. She has graduate degrees in human pathology and environmental chemistry, and was studying biomedical sciences, inflammation, and human health. Researching diseases like HIV is noble, for sure, but it also makes for an extremely stressful career. Melissa turned to the garden to help her manage her everyday life.

Melissa has long been interested in the link between environmental conservation and human health—how our environmental health affects our ability to produce safe, nutrient-dense food, and yet our need for food has driven us to abuse our environment's health. Her background in science drives her to promote sustainable foodscaping, like food that can be produced at home using more natural methods.

After moving back to Florida, Melissa launched Florida Good Life to provide education in gardening and nutrition. She still works as an associate medical director in medical communications, but teaching people about the garden is her passion. She's now a certified Florida Master Naturalist and studies things like permaculture and xeriscaping with Florida native plants for fun.

Learn more about Florida Good Life. 

Laid Off from Her Corporate Job at 63

Sara Rubens had a long career in corporate America, working more than full time as an account manager for a technology company. When she suddenly found herself stuck at home during Covid, she realized that doing the daily grind for all those years had prevented her from ever actually getting any hobbies. So she took up gardening.

She took our Kitchen Garden Academy, built her first garden, and started posting pictures of her new garden on Instagram. She found her DMs inundated with messages like, “Oh my God, Sara, I didn’t know you could do that. How did you learn to garden? Will you help me?”

Sara wondered if she could make a business out of helping people in the garden. She launched her own company and started consulting after 5 pm and on weekends. Fast forward to December 23, 2022. Sara was on Christmas vacation when she found out her company was downsizing, and she was laid off. She was so close to retirement and had been hoping to stick it out at her stressful day job just a little bit longer. She felt devastated. She told her husband, "You know, I’m 63. I can’t brush off my resume and go out and look for another job. I just can’t.”

Fortunately, her garden business was ready to take off, and she ended up replacing her corporate salary with a job that fills her with joy instead of depleting her. Even when it's “hotter than the hinges on the gates of hell in North Carolina, I’ll take being in the gardens I’ve created all day long over sitting behind a computer and talking."

When an awful tragedy struck Sara's family last spring, she was able to take the time off she needed and then return to something that gave her life. "I cannot imagine having to go back to an unfulfilling corporate job after that."

Learn more about Sara's business Seed to Sanctuary in Concord, North Carolina.

Service Industry Employee to Small Business Owner

Kylie Gilliam was visiting family when her uncle asked her, "Kylie, what are you going to do with your life?" She'd been a waitress for a long time and had been asking herself the same question. Should she go to nursing school? Should she further her education? What should she do?

"You know, one day I would really like to help people start their own vegetable gardens," she said. But it was just a dream she kept in the back of her mind. She had no idea how to make it a reality.

She'd been keeping a small garden on the patio of her apartment. Everything changed when she entered a watermelon she'd grown in that tiny space in the Orange County Fair in 2015... and won a blue ribbon! Shortly after, she found Gardenary and realized there was a course out there to help her realize her dream. Becoming a garden consultant was the only thing she could see herself investing in, a career that would grow with her through the years.

Now that she's started her own business, her ultimate goal is to have one of her clients enter a vegetable from the garden that she installed for them into the Orange County Fair and win a blue ribbon of their own. "I get emotional because that's where I started my gardening journey," she says, "and if I could get someone to feel that same joy and surprise from something that they grow in their own garden, that would be amazing."

Check out Blue Ribbon Garden in Huntington Beach, California.

Farm-to-Table to Garden-to-Table

Nicole Enders always knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur, but she didn't know exactly what that would look like. She was working in the hospitality industry, serving farm-to-table food. It was important to her to support local farmers and help people feel more connected to their food. She just assumed she'd stay in the food and bev industry, but then she found Gardenary, and a new possibility for her future clicked into place.

She'd fallen in love with gardening years ago when she was living in Ithaca, NY. There, she was inspired by the slow-food movement and homegrown attitude of the town. There were amazing farmers' markets almost every day of the week, and she participated in multiple CSA programs, which gave her experience in eating with the seasons. She moved to Philadelphia and sought out a farm-to-table restaurant to work at to ensure she'd still be connected to local food even in a more urban environment. She started growing herbs and veggies in containers on her little patio.

Now, she and her husband are turning their yard in Haddon Township, NJ, into an edible oasis, and Nicole is busy running her business, Trellis Garden Co., and raising their two children.

Learn more about Trellis Garden Co. in Haddon Township, New Jersey.

Retired Surgical Neurophysiologist Turned Garden Consultant

Jessica Blaich was a surgical neurophysiologist. Her professional career consisted of sitting in freezing cold operating rooms for 18 hours a day, wrapped in a blanket, as she worked surgical cases. It was, as you can imagine, a high-stress and exhausting job.

One day, her husband sat her down and said, "Look, you cannot do this forever. This is way too much. It's taxing, and I can see how burnt out you are."

Jessica agreed and retired. For the next 10 years, she moved all over the country with her husband's work and ran an Etsy business on the side. It was easy, and she could take it from state to state. During that time, she was also cultivating gardens in Chicago, Southeast Florida, Arizona, and more. By growing in six different zones across the country, she picked up so many skills that culminated in her starting her own garden consulting business. Thanks to all these lessons, "If I don't have an answer for you," she says, "it's probably going to be hard to find one."

As a garden consultant, Jessica blends perennial landscaping and edibles in the kitchen garden. She loves to incorporate native flowers and focuses on organic practices in an effort to support local pollinators.

You can find Jessica at Good Thyme Gardens in Nashville, Tennessee.

Plant Nursery Employee Turned Mother Gardener

Courtney Kern has always felt a pull toward nature. She worked in a plant nursery as a teen, served in an agricultural community in Morocco during her time in the Peace Corps, and became a certified Master Gardener. She always found a way to weave gardening into her life. After she had her two little girls, she became a stay-at-home mom, and gardening really helped pull her through those early days. During the pandemic, she and her family spent as much time outside growing their own food as possible, and she really noticed the impact this had on their emotional wellbeing.

Cortney's neighbors also took note of what she was doing. "Hey, can you teach me? It seems like you know what's going on." And the rest has been history.

Her business, Mother Gardener, is aimed at connecting clients to nature through their gardens—helping them become better guardians of this planet through more sustainable and eco-friendly practices.

Learn more about Mother Gardener in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Horticulturist Turned Payroll Manager Trying to Get Back to Her Roots

Heather Spadone is a horticulturist. As you can probably tell from reading all these other background stories, going to school for plant science is not a requirement to becoming a garden consultant, but Heather is, in fact, a plant expert. Through the various twists and turns of life, she ended up working in corporate finance.

While she was raising her kids and building a corporate career to support her family, she would do little landscape design jobs on the side. Friends would text her all their questions about plants, and she found so much joy in helping them. She kept plants of her own, even when she lived in small spaces—house plants, herbs on the back deck, anything green to help her relax and de-stress.

She had long been wanting to come back to gardening, and now she finally has. She launched Sage Garden Guide to provide garden coaching and design services to help her clients create beautiful, functional outdoor spaces that promote healing and connection with the natural world.

Learn more about Sage Garden Guide in San Diego, California.

What About Me?

What did I do before I started doing this full-time as a garden consultant?

I actually graduated college with a degree in accounting right around the time I decided to have a quarter-life crisis. I'd received a job offer from an accounting firm that was at the time one of the Big Five, but I turned it down and instead moved halfway around the world. I lived overseas for two years and worked with a minority population in a very rural area of China. Those were the hardest two years of my life, but I'm thankful for the real-world experience.

After coming back to the US, I worked in philanthropy for a company that manages charities around the world. I had four kids in four and a half years during that time. By 2015, I'd been homeschooling my kids and working part time for the same company. My youngest was just about to enter preschool. That's when I decided I'd had enough of homeschooling. It wasn't for me. I sent all four of my kids to school that year and started trying to figure out how I could reenter the workforce but still have time flexibility. What could I possibly do from 8 to 12 on weekdays while my youngest was in school?

Maybe the job market has changed since 2015, but at the time, I couldn't find a single company that would hire me based on the hours I said I could work. I decided I was just going to have to come up with my own business. Fast forward to that phone call with my friend Teresa about becoming a garden consultant. And boom! Here we are.

Are You Impressed with These Backgrounds?

It's fascinating to me to meet all of these garden consultants and hear the lives they lived before they dedicated themselves to the garden. Attorneys and flight attendants and high school teachers and marine biologists and nurses and fashion designers—the list goes on.

The main takeaway I would love for you to have is that you can be anything before you become a garden consultant. In fact, the more varied your background, the better, in my opinion. The clients you'll find yourself working with as a garden consultant are people who obviously don't garden for a living. They didn't grow up on a farm. They're pretty removed from the garden-to-table experience. So when they get to know you and learn that you had a different career but also gardened, they'll see the possibility for themselves. They can be a busy mom and a business professional and someone with very little outdoor space and whatever—and still have a garden.

That's what I get from learning about all these garden consultants. It's beautiful to think of their diverse backgrounds and experiences, and how they all found a way to the garden. That's because gardening is meant to be part of our human experience, and they have proven that with their stories.

If this inspires you, we'd love to help you see if becoming a garden consultant is a good fit for you. Thanks so much for being here, and thanks to our garden consultants who inspire me and so many others every day. 

Image Credits: Victoria Quirk Photo