Sharon Loving: A Career in Horticulture

Sharon Loving, Head of the Horticulture Department at Longwood Gardens

The word, horticulture, may be a big word to you. Horticulture means the science of cultivating or nurturing plants and flowers. The woman in charge of the horticulture department at Longwood Gardens has a big job as well as a big word to describe her job. Sharon Loving is a horticulturalist, someone who nurtures flowers and plants.

Sharon enjoyed digging in the dirt and growing flowers when she was a girl. She has succeeded in developing her passion for plants into her full-time job. When she was a little girl planting, watering, weeding, and mulching her flower beds in her yard, she had no idea she would one day be in charge of acres of display gardens at the world-renowned Longwood Gardens located near the city of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.

Sharon, on the right, didn't know when she was a girl she would be working right here at Longwood Gardens. Pictured in front of one of the fantastic fountains in the display garden.

She is responsible for producing and maintaining quality horticultural displays and landscapes for the entire property. She has the joyful job of overseeing the displays of hundreds of colorful mum plants during the Chrysanthemum Festival in the fall and all of the magnificent Christmas decorations during the holidays.

Poinsettia, the Christmas flower

There's a lot of preparation for the Longwood Gardens Annual Christmas displays. Workers set up seventy-seven lighted trees and string up 500,000 holiday lights outdoors. Inside the glass conservatory which is a greenhouse area, Sharon and the staff decorate gorgeous Christmas trees. Thousands of colorful poinsettias, which are traditional Christmas-time plants, and other beautiful flowering plants offer eye-candy for the plant lovers.

Sharon Loving is one of the successful women featured in the interactive e-book, Girls Succeed: Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women available now at Amazon and Smashwords.

Now sit back and enjoy a peek at the Christmas splendor Sharon and her staff creates.