Out of the Box

By Faith Peppers
Photos by Stephanie Schupska

Warm rays of spring sunshine kiss the frostbitten faces of bright yellow pansies lining the front walkway. Branches laden with cherry blossoms soften the nippy breeze. As the birds offer up their morning songs, Mildred Pinnell Fockele surveys the glorious blue sky that forms her offi ce ceiling and admires the watercolor blooms that paint the walls.

For Fockele, it just wouldn't be enough to work in an offi ce overlooking such beauty. Like a growing number of other professionals in the blossoming world of horticulture, she has to be out there in it.

For the past 19 years, Fockele has worked for the Atlanta Botanical Garden. She is now the garden's horticulture director.

Having all this natural beauty as a daily work space and not just a weekend getaway would be a dream for some. Of course, not everyone sees digging in the dirt as a career.

"It's fun," Fockele said. "You get to do a lot of different things. You aren't just stuck at a desk doing a repetitive job... But some people seem to look down on professions where you work with your hands and get dirty. I think horticulture is an art form. It's really science and art working together."

Today, she oversees the outdoor gardens of the Atlanta Botanical Garden. She's also helping develop their new 185-acre woodland gardens in Gainesville, Ga.

Fockele discovered a real love for working with plants while working on her biology degree at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga. "I was on a work-study program at Agnes Scott, and my job was to work in the college's greenhouses," she recalled. "I had a professor who said, 'If this is what you love, then we should go talk to the botanical gardens about an internship.' And, so, that's what I did. I was the first intern ever hired here."

When she graduated, she went to the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences for her master's degree.

"I actually started out in botany," she said. "But I did another internship here in the summer, and the director convinced me I needed to switch over to horticulture. She called up (UGA horticulture professor) Mike Dirr, and he was able to get me into the spot of a student who was leaving."

Fockele's not the only CAES alumna at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Four years ago, Amanda Briner (BSA – Horticulture '01) joined Fockele's staff.

"I grew up on a farm, and I had no inclination about spending my career indoors," Briner said.

"I had to go into something outdoors. I, too, started in botany but quickly figured out it was that hands-on, practical application that I wanted and switched over to horticulture."

Amanda Briner knew all along where her interest lay. "There's so much to choose from in that major. But I knew right off the bat that I wanted to be in public horticulture," she said. "I wasn't tied to the Atlanta area. So I felt that with all the botanical gardens in the U.S., I had a very solid education that could help me get a job at one of them. It just happened to work out that I got one here."

The fact that both were originally in botany and switched to horticulture comes as no surprise to CAES horticulture department head Doug Bailey. "Only 8 percent of our students start with our department as freshmen," he said. "More than 60 percent are internal transfers from other colleges within UGA."

Fockele and Briner agree that the CAES program is a solid education program. But learning horticulture, they say, requires some dirt under your fingernails. "You can learn all you want in a classroom," Fockele said, "but until you actually get out there and watch plants suffer or look at pests all over a plant or have to amend the soil, you just don't get it."

"You can only go so far in the classroom with such an outdoors, hands-on job," Briner said.

To address that need, Bailey's faculty has begun creating innovative programs. The HORT2000 class, for instance, incorporates service-learning and other hands-on applications so students see how many times a day their lives come in contact with horticulture.

"Everyone uses our products, from choosing what's fresh in the grocery-store produce aisle to what's grown in their landscapes," Bailey said. The hort classes "have a food day, where students bring in a dish made with a horticulture product. They do a pumpkin carving. They care for a plant all semester and get involved with service learning." The course is so popular that it doubled this year to more than 300 students. It will be offered twice each semester next year to accommodate the demand.

"I think if you go through that program, if you didn't already have a genuine love of plants, you will definitely come out of it just loving plants and the horticulture industry," Briner said.

Bailey's annual survey of graduating seniors shows that the small class size, caring faculty and the faculty's strong reputation in the industry attract the most students.

"The program does have a good reputation," Fockele said. "Part of that was based on the reputation of professors like Dirr and (Allan) Armitage. There are a lot of connections through the horticulture department to people in the industry, so there's a good network there for students. It's a nice, broad-based program, so you're well versed when you get out. You have a number of jobs available to you."

Bailey said Georgia's green industry has four to five available jobs to every graduating student. "We aren't graduating enough students to meet the industry demand."

That's a good problem to have if you're a graduating senior looking for work. "One of the greatest selling points for a degree in horticulture is the growth in the industry," Briner said. "In some areas, you get a degree in it and you don't know if you'll be able to get a job. But for horticulture, it has really taken off. Horticulture is an industry that has always been there, will always be there and is only getting bigger. And it's fun."

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