Why don't young people consider a gardening job? Statistically, I'm on safe ground if I guess you're not a professional gardener. I'm also likely to be right if I assume that a career in horticulture never even crossed your mind when you were younger. According to a new Royal Horticultural Society report "Horticulture Matters," which coincides with National Gardening Week (April 15-21), and is soon to be presented to Parliament, almost half of under-25s do not think gardening is a skilled career, and nearly 70 per cent of 18 year-olds think gardening should be considered as a career only for those who have failed academically. Basically, gardening is for dropouts, and if a young hoodie finds you weeding a flower bed in your local park, he's likely to assume you're carrying out a community service order; certainly nothing else would induce him to get dirt under his fingernails. The RHS survey further revealed that 70 per cent of 18-year-olds do not think gardening is a career to be proud of, while 79 per cent of those aged 40 or over hold exactly the opposite opinion. Of course there are many young gardeners, but for the most part it seems that gardening, like classical music and crown green bowling, is something that creeps up on people of a certain age. At a time of massive youth unemployment, and with the British horticultural industry lamenting the increasing lack of skilled home-grown job applicants, this is bizarre. Quite apart from the damage to the industry, there's the human cost that comes from (as the survey also found) the 70 per cent of adults who reported that no one mentioned even the possibility of horticulture as a career when they were leaving education. So, hardly surprisingly, gardening is awash with older career changers who have only just discovered that gardening as a career actually exists. I do just a little bit of teaching on Kew's Horticulture Diploma, and in recent years I've taught (among many others) an ex-policeman, an ex-barrister and an ex-midwife. People who were 30 before they realised they were too charitable to be a police officer, too candid to be a lawyer, and preferred seedlings to babies. It's great that these people, and many like them, have at last discovered gardening, but what a waste that this didn't happen when they were younger. Can't you just feel your heart sink when you read a letter to the RHS magazine The Garden lamenting: "I wish I had been directed towards a career in horticulture instead of a secretarial course." Ah yes, the secretarial course: the last refuge of the incompetent careers adviser. Emma Thompson's great line (to Carey Mulligan's stroppy teenager) in the film An Education, "It doesn't have to be teaching. There's always the Civil Service," only works so well because it reflects a basic truth about lack of imagination when it comes to careers for school leavers. Left to themselves, young people all too readily associate gardening with the bloke driving a gang mower endlessly around the local park, or the old chap they see tending his cabbages on the allotment. These are not inspiring images. Instead, we need to point to the Olympic Park, the largest new park in London for a century, and a horticultural achievement as stunning in its own way as Danny Boyle's opening ceremony or David Weir's gold medal collection. And to British horticulture, an industry with a turnover of more than £5 billion a year, offering a huge range of careers in retailing, marketing, growing, landscaping, manufacturing, design and logistics. Or maybe we simply need to get across the message that growing plants is healthy, rewarding and fun, so why would you not want to be paid to do it for a living? The RHS and others are doing sterling work in getting gardening into primary schools, but it's later, in secondary school, that teenagers need to be made aware of and enthused about horticulture as a career. When the Olympic Park reopens as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (it will be partially revealed this July), every school in London should pay a visit. Maybe David Cameron should go too, and discover that horticulture has nothing in common with litter picking. The Uncomfortable Truth About Biodiversity.