| A Quiet Smirk, a Loud Message, and the Stories Young People Are Being Sold I recently had a conversation with a young person, now 17 and turning 18 next month, that has stayed with me far longer than I expected. What made it particularly striking is that this wasn’t an opinion formed from the outside. This was someone who had been working casually for me for about a year. In the early days, they’d spoken positively about being outdoors and had even expressed an interest in working in the horticultural industry. Gardening, at one point, felt like a genuine option for them. So when they said that gardening wasn’t really a career move, and that it would probably break their body quicker than most jobs, it wasn’t just the words that landed. It was the smirk that came with it — a faintly amused expression, as if the idea of gardening being a “real job” was slightly quaint. The moment wasn’t offensive. If anything, I found it quietly humorous. Not because the comment was particularly insightful, but because of where it came from. There’s something oddly revealing when dismissiveness comes not from deep understanding, but from confidence borrowed from the idea of being “smart” — academically capable within a fairly narrow lane, comfortable using the language of status and success, yet largely untested by wider reading, sustained curiosity, or depth of questioning. That isn’t to say the young person wasn’t intelligent. They clearly were. But intelligence and understanding are not the same thing. This was someone still at sixth form, focused primarily on sport, studying sport psychology alongside double sport, and only taking the academic route because triple sport wasn’t available. Throughout their time working with me, they consistently chose — and even requested — the most basic physical tasks. Because of their physique, they gravitated toward what might be described as grunt work. They showed little interest in the quieter, more thoughtful aspects of horticulture: planning, observation, plant knowledge, or decision-making. And yet it was gardening itself that was being dismissed as unserious. What makes that judgment more telling is that it wasn’t made in the absence of opportunity. In the early days, I had genuinely considered offering them a trainee gardener role — a chance to learn the trade properly, with progression, responsibility, and a longer view. As time went on, I went further. On two separate occasions, I offered them a full-time position starting when they turned 18, even while they remained in sixth form. Both offers were turned down on the same grounds: that gardening wasn’t a real job, and therefore not worth committing to. I won’t be making a third offer. Not out of frustration or spite, but because that decision itself says something important. When someone repeatedly declines a real, tangible opportunity in favour of an abstract idea of what a career ought to look like, it becomes clear that the conversation is no longer about the work in front of them. It’s about the stories they’ve already accepted as true. Those stories don’t arise in a vacuum. From an early age, many young people absorb the belief that “real careers” are tied to qualifications, clear progression ladders, and indoor, knowledge-based work. Physical jobs are framed as temporary, something you do before moving on. Gardening, when it features at all, is often reduced to mowing lawns or manual labour, rarely presented as skilled, strategic, or intellectually demanding. Layered on top of this is a newer and particularly powerful influence: social media wealth culture. Young people are surrounded by images of so-called millionaire influencers promising freedom, luxury, and early success through online businesses, crypto, trading, or personal brands. These stories are visually compelling and emotionally seductive. They present a version of work where money appears detached from time, place, effort, or physical reality. Against that backdrop, work that involves soil, seasons, and gradual skill-building can start to look outdated — even faintly laughable. In that context, the smirk makes sense. Gardening doesn’t perform well in a culture obsessed with spectacle and speed. It doesn’t promise shortcuts. It doesn’t disguise effort. It is honest in a way that can easily be misread as unsophisticated. Yet this is where the wider reality begins to pull in the opposite direction. Qualifications no longer guarantee security as they once did. Progression ladders are often flatter than advertised, leaving many young people stuck or forced to move sideways repeatedly. Many indoor, knowledge-based roles also carry hidden costs — chronic stress, burnout, physical stagnation — as they are increasingly exposed to automation, outsourcing, and artificial intelligence. AI will undoubtedly reshape large parts of the job market. Many roles built around screens, analysis, and repeatable processes are already changing rapidly. What’s striking is how rarely young people are encouraged to ask which kinds of work are actually hardest to replace. Gardening — real gardening — is rooted in place, judgement, timing, weather, living systems, and human relationships. It requires adaptation, care, and responsiveness to conditions that cannot be fully predicted or standardised. You can automate data far more easily than you can read a garden, understand a client’s space, or work sensitively with soil, plants, and wildlife. In an uncertain future, that kind of work is not fragile — it’s resilient. What these interactions highlighted for me wasn’t arrogance, but distance — distance between how work is imagined and how it actually functions; between how intelligence is signalled and how value is created; between the visible effort of gardening and the invisible knowledge it contains. Gardening done well is not just labour. It is observation, timing, restraint, decision-making, and responsibility. It asks for an understanding of living systems and long-term consequences. It rewards patience more than bravado. These qualities don’t announce themselves loudly — and perhaps that’s part of the problem. So yes, I found the smirk amusing. Not because it revealed insight, but because it captured something quietly ironic: the dismissal of a real, offered opportunity in favour of an idea of success shaped by narratives that are already unraveling. Perhaps the more important question isn’t why gardening is sometimes dismissed as a career, but why we continue to underestimate work that is grounded, skilled, and difficult to automate — and why confidence so often arrives before understanding, while the most future-proof forms of work are quietly overlooked. |
Is Gardening a Real Career?
Earthly Comforts 