Seasonal stakeout
Horticulture education: Ruminations, confessions, and advice Story and photos by Michelle Sutton
ABOVE: Dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) trunk.
I
was twenty-five years old when I walked into a community college bookstore in Sterling, Virginia. I wanted to get a feel for the textbooks I’d need if I enrolled in the horticulture program there. I picked up the heavy chemistry text, opened to the middle, and ran my eyes over the facing pages—then promptly freaked out and left the bookstore, distraught. I’d attended three semesters of college right out of high school but academically felt adrift, so I took what ended up being a five-year break to work various jobs and figure out what I wanted to do. Organic vegetable farming was my favorite of the types of work I tried out, but I needed a better paying way forward in horticulture. To even contemplate going back to school, I had to overcome many fears and a good helping of self-doubt: was my brain capable of revving back up enough to study full time? Did I have what it took to pursue a profession? With no family to help me, how would I afford my education? In high school, chemistry and geometry were the courses I felt most disengaged from—yet here I was, my future horticulture education hinging on a foundation
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of natural science and math courses. Eventually, I realized the mistake I’d made in the community college bookstore: I’d opened the textbook in the middle. Of course, everything I saw in the middle of the book seemed impossibly technical. In what became a guiding notion for the next six years of my education, I learned that whenever I was overwhelmed, I needed to remind myself to simply start at the beginning. I figured out how to make best friends with the subjects I was most afraid of. I bought workbooks in chemistry and geometry and spent a good deal of time with them in the months before I went back to school. I remember so clearly the feeling of elation when I could, eventually, work through a geometry proof step by step, confidently and without anxiety. — I had a fantastic two-year education at community college, and then too at Virginia Tech, where I got my bachelor’s degree in horticulture-crops. I discovered that the “crops” that interested me the most were actually ornamental plants, and I also became interested in public
