The Autumn sun is beaming down on the garden that Shane Phelan is creating at Kildalton College, Piltown, Co Kilkenny. Of course, it's not always like that. Being a landscape gardener means taking the rain, the hail, the frost and the mud in your stride.

Phelan is a graduate of Kildalton, having spent three years there on a residential horticulture course. "I'm from a farming family and I was always interested in horticulture. I did my Leaving Cert in St Kieran's College, in Kilkenny, in 1991 and then came here. The course was good on plant knowledge and garden design. It was fun. There were about 180 students (men and women). It's not in the heart of the city and it was simple country life."

He says the course did not have a big emphasis on business, concentrating more on onsite skills, but there will be an increased business emphasis in the new courses which will be offer from next year (see below).

Graduating from Kildalton in 1994, Phelan went to work as a nursery supervisor in Kilcock, Co Kildare. "I worked with plants, propagating and cultivating them for sale to garden centres. Everything from small shrubs such as Abeila to large conifers like cedar trees." Two year later, he moved back home to the family farm in Co Kilkenny and he set up his own landscape business, Shane Phelan Landscapes. "You need a lot of confidence, a background in horticulture and a good bank manager." Phelan started with one van and some tools, mainly creating gardens for new homes.

"Starting a new garden, the first thing is a soil test to find out if the soil is acid or alkaline. Then we have to check the drainage, and look for cables and other underground services.

"There are two sides to the work: hard and soft landscaping. The hard landscaping is the building side such as patios and footpaths. The soft side is the planting - lawns and trees."

He consults closely with the client, as the garden must be built to his or her wishes, within the constraints of the environment. This can be tricky, but if everything is carefully explained from the start, it works, he says. "We can't afford to let any misunderstandings go too far."

Most of the gardens are between a half- and one acre and usually take between one and two weeks to landscape. The team usually returns to do any maintenance needed in about 18 months. The cost to the client can be up to £4,000.

Now he has two vans and three people working for him. "We're busy summer and winter, with more hard landscaping in winter and more planting in summer. I'm hoping to expand and set up a structured workforce with a foreman and supervisor and an office staff. There could be 10 people in the business in three year's time."

The plus side of the job is meeting new people all the time, says Phelan, while the downside is the winter weather. He is probably proudest of the restoration job his firm did on the 200-year-old garden surrounding Butler House in Kilkenny. "We took everything apart and started again. We had to source suitable large specimen plants."

The display garden he was making in Kildalton College, during the recent Teagasc open day, will be open to the public. It's a mixture of hard and soft landscaping, with plants chosen to suit the old stone wall boundary. With a soil pH of 6.8, he says plant choice is wide as both acid- and alkali-needing plants can be grown.

"It's very rewarding to build a garden from scratch. It's a very challenging career."