Historic places are more than their buildings. Their cultural landscapes — orchards, cemeteries, gardens, grounds — tell stories too, and keeping them requires skills that ordinary landscaping doesn’t teach. The Traditional Trades Advancement Program–Landscape Stewardship Corps (TTAP-LSC) was created to train the next generation to do it.
Youth and military veterans are invited to join the Landscape Stewardship Corps of the National Park Service. NPS.
Landscape Stewardship Corps interns at a June 2024 training at national park sites around Baltimore. Image from NPS’s page.
Who it is for
The corps takes young people aged 18 to 30 — or up to 35 for veterans. It is meant as an introduction to the trade, so little or no experience in horticulture, historic preservation or landscape maintenance is needed, and it emphasizes recruiting people from backgrounds underrepresented in those fields.
What makes preservation maintenance different
Caring for a cultural landscape starts with research and planning, so that every task strengthens the site’s historic integrity. The work often calls for specialized techniques:
- careful pruning and protection of heritage trees
- propagating historic plants
- extra care when working around historic structures
Learning in the parks
Interns work at host parks across the country — from the historic orchards of Yosemite in California to the national cemetery at Andersonville in Georgia and the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home in Mississippi — learning pruning, turf care and horticulture on the job alongside park mentors.
Horticulturist James Hogan teaches interns how to plant and stake a tree. Image from NPS’s page.
James Hogan, a horticulturist at Fort McHenry and Hampton National Historic Site in Maryland who mentored two interns, has said that teaching them was rewarding, but that the greater joy was watching them grow as people and as future leaders.
Training and a path to jobs
Beyond their parks, interns take part in program-wide training. In summer 2024, the cohort met in Baltimore for a three-day workshop on tree identification, planting, pruning, nursery operations, soil, site assessment, equipment and tool care, and more, and at Hampton National Historic Site learned why historical context matters in maintaining a landscape. A career session connected them with NPS staff, Interior Department representatives and green-industry professionals.
TTAP-LSC interns at the 2024 cohort training in Baltimore learn the importance of historical context for cultural landscape maintenance at Hampton National Historic Site. NPS.
Interns also receive professional development stipends and guidance on federal résumés and USAJOBS. Those who complete the program can apply for federal jobs through Public Land Corps hiring authority or Direct Hire Authority, easing the move into permanent NPS work.
An NPS instructor speaks to TTAP-LSC interns about tree identification and assessment. NPS.
Intern Hope Dailey (right) planting at Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site in California. Image from NPS’s page.
Intern Hope Dailey described learning to see places as historic landscapes — realizing that pruning, planting and weeding can help tell a site’s story — and growing more independent by running projects of her own.
About the program
The Landscape Stewardship Corps is run by the National Park Service with the nonprofit American Conservation Experience, managed by the NPS Historic Preservation Training Center and the Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation, and funded through the Inflation Reduction Act as part of the American Climate Corps.
Sources
Based on "Training the Next Generation of Cultural Landscape Stewards," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain, with the participants’ remarks rewritten in hubnx’s own words. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.
- The film and any audio are the National Park Service's own files, from the source page.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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