Education & the RHS

Careers

Student Profile - Cornelia Zielke

Cornelia has always had a keen interest in gardening, so when left school she took an apprenticeship at a tree nursery in her native Germany. She has a great love of being outside, surrounded by nature and having contact with plants. Working full time on the nursery and attending college one day a week she soon picked up skills in growing ornamental shrubs, roses, fruit trees, conifers and container plants.

After the year-long apprenticeship, Cornelia continued to extend her knowledge and took a job working on a nursery growing perennials where she worked in the propagation unit. She applied for a Practitioner Exchange between Germany and England, and was offered a place on the Hillier’s Tree Production Unit at Liss. During her time at Hillier’s, Cornelia took the opportunity to visit a number of English gardens, including Wisley where she found the garden teeming with trainee gardeners doing the very things that she desired. She applied for a Wisley traineeship principally to develop her knowledge of amenity horticulture, and is keen to observe how the trees and shrubs she has had experience in growing interact with the environment when they are mature. This will help her in her career objective of improving the environment long term - she would like to bring quality horticulture into the lives of more people, and this she hopes to achieve by becoming the Head Gardener at a botanical or heritage garden in the UK - one that is open to the public so that they can appreciate a well managed environment.

On leaving Wisley Cornelia took a job as a sole gardener in charge of a large private garden in Hampshire. The challenge of a job like this will put her previous experience to good use whilst enabling her to work towards her career aims.

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