A Day in the Life of a Landscape and Garden Maintenance Intern

Hello again! This week for my blog post, I thought I would share with you what a typical day in the life of an outdoor landscape and garden maintenance looks like. A lot of my tasks involve preparing the Gardens to look neat and pretty when our guests arrive. This means that when the sun is rising early in the morning I am out doing morning chores such as blowing off our new sidewalks to clear debris, raking our gravel pathways in fancy patterns to give a “Zen garden” feel to our spaces, cleaning out filters from our streams and water features, and watering everything like crazy! These tasks happen every morning before people start arriving at the Gardens. My job also includes a lot of landscape design as we are constantly working to improve the Gardens and work toward our new 20-year master plan. This means that throughout the summer, I have been planting a lot of new perennials, annuals, trees and shrubs as well as moving/taking out others. I have gotten to be in charge of designing the containers around my area of the Gardens and incorporating a lot of color, texture, and design into them. This summer has been full of learning a lot about how maintenance of a botanical garden like Reiman Gardens works and learning new skills such as fixing broken irrigation heads, vacuuming out the fountains, cutting and moving sod, and fertigation. Overall, I have learned how to be a better problem solver this summer and have been quicker on my feet to know what to do when a situation arises.

Summer is ending fast, but I have enjoyed every minute of working at Reiman Gardens. I am thankful for this opportunity and for the people that I have gotten to work with.

— Alexis Acton