Anyone looking for an assured job for life should consider the horticultural industry. It has seen steady growth (no pun intended) over the past two decades and suffered barely a blip during the two most recent recessions. 
Professional gardeners are always in a seller’s market. Fashions come and go, but gardening and food growing remain the nation’s top pastimes.
Along with this goes a passion for visiting gardens, and a readiness to splash out hundreds of millions of pounds at garden centres. The industry employs more than 160,000 people, and pay, at least at upper managerial levels, remains roughly competitive with other industries. 
Yet, despite these assets, it faces something of a crisis in recruitment. Some 72 per cent of horticultural businesses have vacancies that they cannot fill. 
Some 70 per cent of young people around school-leaving age have a negative perception of horticulture, viewing it as an unskilled career without prospects. 
One young person who has had no hesitation at all about entering the industry, is 16-year-old Jonah Kirkwood. Jonah is in the first year of an apprenticeship at Hyde Hall Gardens, the most visited gardens in Essex, owned and run by the Royal Horticultural Society. 
His choice of career began with a process of elimination. He says: “I knew I didn’t want to spend my life cooped up in an office.”
He was encouraged into a gardening career even earlier, by a high-achieving triumph. 
“I won the second tallest sunflower in a competition in Maldon,” he says. 
Jonah did work experience with his uncle, in Scotland, who owns a landscaping business, and it sealed his determination to go into 
horticulture. 
He says: “I like the outdoor life and I like that it’s so hands-on. There’s this mixture of soft jobs, like planting, and hard graft ones, like making footpaths.
“It’s a job that you can do 
anywhere in the world, especially with an RHS qualification. I hope to travel after I’ve passed my exams. I particularly like the idea of working in Italy.” 
 Fully-qualified gardeners have to carry literally hundreds of Latin names for plants in their heads, and to be able to instantly identify and classify any plant in the RHS collection. It gives the lie to the idea that gardening is non-academic. 
Jonah says: “Everyone finds the Latin names a bit of a challenge. But one of the other apprentices told me about this RHS book called Latin for Gardeners, which breaks the names down for you. Since I got a copy, that side of things has got a lot easier.” 
He has no doubts about his career course and says the apprenticeship scheme is “absolutely brilliant.” 
He says: “There are people here with so much experience and you  learn so much just by watching the way they do things, and asking questions.” 
His chief mentor is Hyde Hall’s garden manager Andrew Lodge.
Andrew has been part of the Hyde Hall environment for over 30 years and is passing on his knowledge to the apprentices in the same way the acquired it from the garden’s founders, Dick and Helen Robinson. 
Next year, Jonah will follow in Andrew’s footsteps when he  attends Writtle College on a day release basis, proceeding to the City & Guilds exam.