Science

The Environmental Horticulture team looks at the challenges in gardening and ornamental horticulture that are driven by a changing climate and a growing population. There’s a focus on soils, plants, water and people and how they can affect each other in a gardening. It’s about researching practical solutions that will help people to garden sustainably. And using our knowledge to improve environmental health and people’s wellbeing.

The Plant Health team works to encourage good stewardship of nature, enhance biodiversity, reduce biosecurity risk and improve natural resilience in gardens. Our team of scientists, advisors and research assistants covers a range of specialist knowledge. Join us and you’ll find a collaborative approach as we research ways to detect, identify and sustainably manage plant health issues, from root diseases to caterpillars. We also play a key role in giving RHS members, the public and policymakers evidence-based advice on plant health problems, biosecurity issues and biodiversity.

In Horticultural Information team, you’ll help to look after our plant knowledge and share it with our members, gardeners and the horticultural industry. We run the RHS Gardening Advice service, answering more than 100,000 gardening questions a year by post, email, phone calls and at shows around the UK. Our advice supports millions more people online. We also manage a huge database of plants, including 35,000 plant profiles on our website, write online articles and give expert advice to other RHS teams.

Join the Horticultural Taxonomy team and you’ll be joining a globally-recognised leader and the designated international registration authority for nine groups of cultivated plants. We focus on recording the diversity of more than 400,000 cultivated plants growing in the UK. As a member of the team, you could be involved in preserving specimens or providing the correct naming for plants. Whatever your role, your work will support valuable research that underpins the value of these plants for ecosystem services and conservation.

• Contribute to improving gardening knowledge and biodiversity support for horticultural experts and individual gardeners alike
• Help create balanced garden ecosystems that are lively biodiversity havens for a sustainable gardening future
• Challenge long-held gardening beliefs, such as ‘all slugs being a danger to plants’ or ‘you shouldn’t tolerate leaves with holes or blemishes on’
• Investigate new solutions to old problems such as rose black spot

• Address a host of biosecurity challenges
• Help introduce mobile technology to capture plant data, update records, order labels and change plant maps of our gardens more efficiently
• Look at the best ways to use technology in answering gardening questions
• Collaborate with teams across the RHS to work towards peat-free growing