The basis of a career in garden design and mentoring.
Features interviews with mentors Peter Donegan MSGD, John Wyer and Emma Mazzullo and mentees Christina Sullivan and Hannah Smith. It discusses my mentoring with Elissa Astorino of Niagara Parks School of Horticulture who worked on my 2nd show garden at Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show 2024 and, designed her own border garden at the same show.
Beautiful Minds for The Garden Design Journal by Arabella St John Parker Editor for The Society of Garden Designers Magazine, published November 2024
While formal training and work experience form the basis of a career in garden design, mentoring provides invaluable insight and inspiration, as Arabella St John Parker finds out.
Mentoring? Do you mean coaching? Or perhaps an apprenticeship?
“Neither, says John Wyer FSSD. ‘Mentoring is a process that involves someone with experience and expertise giving advice to someone who is less experienced. Coaching is when somebody passes on their skills to someone else who can then find the answers for themselves and improve their own skills and knowledge.’
Its helping someone to understand and see how business works, agrees Peter Donegan MSGD, whose recent mentee, Canadian garden designer Elissa Astorino, approached him for mentoring while she was studying at Niagara Parks School of Horticulture in Canada and was still in her third year there when she designed her first show exhibit at the Melbourne International Flower and Gaden Show.
You’re a guide who shows them what’s going to appear around the comer, what’s on the horizon and what you need to have ready, says Peter. You’re kind of an accountant meets a solicitor meets a school teacher, and it’s all about the steps along the way.
To the question of whether mentoring is an essential career move, or a nice to have opportunity, Peter says: Having seen proven good results for people who’ve been mentored and who have followed the strategies they’ve learned, I think it has to be seen as essential:
Certainly it is something Peter wishes he had been able to do when he was starting out as a garden designer, he tells me.
Finding a Mentor.
All the people I spoke to for this article agreed that while experience is a nonnegotiable pre-requisite to be a mentor, so long as you are determined to set and achieve goals, and to be successful there is never a wrong time to become a mentee. That said, the consensus among the mentors particularly was that some of the most valuable type of mentoring is that received at the start of a garden designer’s professional career.
’It’s an interesting point and can probably only be answered by the mentees themselves‘, says John. My gut feeling is it’s probably more useful when you are two or three years into your career, but we have an internal mentoring programme at Bowles and Wyer that continues even for experienced members of staff.
1 was recently approached by someone I mentored six years ago, he adds. ‘She said the mentoring was useful then but she felt it would have been really useful for her now.
Establishing contact with a potential mentor while designers are still at college can be advantageous in more ways than one, says Peter.
I think once you’ve decided garden design is for you then it’s a question of identifying that one person who can guide you and I think that happens between year one and year two of college, especially if there’s no formal mentoring programme on offer in the final year.
‘Just establishing the mentoring relationship at that point, Peter continues, ‘and keeping the line of communication open through to year four means you have that person there for the occasional “How am I doing?” or What do I need to do between years one and four?” questions, and of course, it can lead to help gaining that vital work experience, especially in landscaping, during the summer holidays.
As for who to approach, in the absence of a formal programme such as that offered by the SGD (see panel opposite and on page 35), prospective mentees should look to those designers whose work not only strikes a chord but whose professional business methods, as far as they can tell, chime with the visions the mentee has for their own (future) approach.
‘Ask yourself who do you aspire to be like, who do feel you can learn from? advises Peter, ‘and when you send that cold-call email, be definitive about your goals and what you want or need to achieve them.
The search can take time (emails and telephone calls, depressingly, can fall on stony ground), and approaches need to be made with confidence. ‘A mentee once told me it’s a bit like walking into a nightclub and trying to find The One, says Peter, ‘but as a mentor, while there’s no financial gain and it takes up your time, I believe that if someone puts out a hand asking for help and they believe my work can help and inspire them, then I and my peers have an obligation to say yes, to help grow, widen and improve the industry, to make what we do that little bit more different, and then our mentees will do the same for the generation that follows them.
