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As a child growing up on a Rockingham County farm, Justin Durham knew he never wanted to wear a suit to work. “I would go crazy cooped up in an office,” Durham says, laughing. 

After taking horticulture classes in high school, Durham envisioned owning his own tree farm, but knew he’d need more training to make his dream a reality. That’s where the horticulture technology program at Rockingham Community College (RCC) came in.

The 24-year-old looked at other horticulture programs in the area but kept coming back to the one right in his own backyard.

“I really liked that Rockingham Community College has small classes and that it’s very hands-on,” says Durham, who graduated with a diploma in horticulture technology in 2007.

The program usually consists of only about 20 students and is structured with labs that often take place on campus.

“With just a handful of students in each class, it’s more personal,” he says.

Horticulture technology students take classes covering a wide variety of subjects, including landscape maintenance, plant production and pest control. The curriculum prepares students to become certified landscape contractors through the North Carolina Nursery and Landscape Association.

Lead horticulture instructor Brad Overby says certification offers landscapers a competitive edge when getting established in the business.

“There are always jobs for skilled landscapers,” Overby says. “Even in tight times, people want nice-looking yards, and consumers today want the added value of someone who knows what they are planting and why.”

Even with experience working on his family’s farm, Durham found the program challenging. Plant identification was one of his toughest classes. “The instructor would take us out on a one-hour walk around campus, point to a tree and we’d have to identify it,” he says.

At the end of the semester, students had learned the common and scientific names of more than 300 plants. For Durham, now a landscaper with Kirk’s Greenhouse in Reidsville, where his duties include planting trees and installing irrigation systems, it was time well spent.

“Someone will come to me with a landscaping problem and I can figure out what is going is on and what a certain plant needs,” he says.

Like most other students in the program, Durham worked full-time in the field while attending classes. The program accommodates students’ schedules by holding classes from 4 to 8 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

Durham still dreams of running his own tree farm someday. One of his favorite classes was nursery operations, in which he had to write a full business plan for his future farm.

“I had to figure out how many plants to plant at one time, unit costs, cost of selling, cost of chemicals and cost of irrigation,” he says. “It gave me an idea of what I could look forward to.”

But even if Durham decides to change his career plans down the road, he knows what he learned in school will always come in handy. “No matter what I do in the world, these are skills that I will always use,” he says.

Career Tracks, which publishes on the third Sunday of the month, focuses on education options available at public and private schools and learning facilities in the Triad. Have a suggestion for a program you’d like to see featured? Contact Patrick Collins at 412-5934 or patrick.collins@news-record.com.