Horticultural Internships
As funding allows, Theodore Payne Foundation is proud to offer internship opportunities to college students and those in career transition. In this apprentice-style program, interns divide their time among four horticulture programs: seed, production, sales, and maintenance. Interns will participate in all aspects of each program.
Please check back for available internships.
At the culmination of the internship, the intern should be comfortable in a production setting and be adequately prepared for employment in a small-scale nursery or landscape maintenance enterprise.
Interns will learn the practices and techniques necessary to skillfully accomplish all aspects of nursery duties, including:
- Asexual and sexual propagation; irrigation; weed, pest, and disease monitoring and management; plant culture and care; and transplanting,
- Seed collection, viability assessment, storage, and packaging,
- Native plant identification and marketing of nursery stock, and
- Techniques to maintain healthy plants and irrigation systems.
We will announce the graduation of the interns on our web site and to our professional members to help them to secure positions.
In 2016, TPF received a generous grant from the Ahmanson Foundation to support its internship program. Ten students or recent graduates completed that program and half secured employment with native plant organizations.
“The internship opportunity put on by TPF was the perfect experience for me to transition into the working world after graduating university. I got the chance to intensively learn about CA native plants, how nurseries work, and all the networking that comes with being around an active education facility. With a passion for transforming the world for better and a degree in Environmental Biology, the horticultural internship really showed me it is possible to work with plants and connect them to the public world – that is exactly what I want in a career.” – 2017 Intern