2019 BBM Horticulture Scholar

I now work in Sydney, get this, for a company who has a landscape management contract with Royal Botanic Garden Sydney!

We are in the process this past week of creating some meadow gardens for spring and summer.

It’s such a great opportunity and I’ve been teaching the guys I work with about plants and the history of the gardens, there’s a new tour lesson every day we walk in and around, I love it 😂

It’s been my dream to work here and I’ve visited regularly every year for the past four or five years, such a wonderful location in the heart of our busiest city.

I’ve been catching up via chat with my fellow BBM scholars Brayden Fitzpatrick in Adelaide and Mitch Cross in Sydney and sharing our current movements and ideas for the future.

I am also involved with an educational project with Jane Teniswood (amazing woman as well as her husband, Tom, based in Tasmania) who is one of the Australian Garden Council directors whom Narelle Smith (AGC) put me in contact with, and she wants input regarding horticulture and young people to develop school programs during and after the Covid period.

I’ll be writing info pamphlets for school goers and also people who have small spaces such as apartments, to explain the joys of gardening, the rewards of it and how to grow plants where you’d never expect possible. Still in its very early stages but I am very interested to see the project develop!

I should wait till I’ve come back and digested my scholarship journey before saying all of this, but so far, it’s already been utterly amazing, and I just have to voice it.

Regardless of the opportunity and possibility to travel and do the amazing things I’d planned to do for the journey ahead, the experience I have so far gained; of networking, creating a path and forcing myself to enter realms previously unimagined, has been totally life changing and of incredible developmental benefit to my character and person. The exposure to industry leaders, the engagement with domestic as well as foreign institutions of professional prowess has forever influenced not only my ability, but my willingness to aim high and go get it.

I considered myself as mildly confident in myself and content in my position which I was in before I applied for the scholarship in 2019, when I met Graham Ross at my graduation of TAFE to receive my Diploma of Horticulture, and where he gave me the wild idea to make that application, but now having challenged myself and making that break from my comfort zone, I have a newfound fervour: to strive in my career and relinquish any previous comfort of bumbling along as I have and do – for a great lesson in humility and progression in one’s self is to realise one’s capabilities and act.

Making drastic and necessary changes to my once day-to-day, changing jobs and living arrangements, contacting formidably important industry role models and organisations, devouring new and past resources to increase my knowledge and understanding in my profession, would never at all have been decisions I could have made without the influence and support of BBM. I haven’t even left for the scholarship yet and I feel I’ve gained so much so far!

I truly mean it when I say this has been the most positive, encouraging, rewarding, wholesome, inspiring, and I must admit, terrifically daunting experience of my life so far, and I want to thank you and everyone involved for this experience. I have sincere gratitude for everyone’s selfless efforts.

I wouldn’t know how to draw, aim or release this arrow that I’ve hewn and refined if I didn’t have the bow which was crafted and given to me by Graham Ross, Andrew Fisher Tomlin, other industry leaders and BBM, who have each given me such astounding guidance, opportunities and willpower, all of which I don’t think I’d ever expected to receive.

I am ever so thankful.