The Right Tool for the Job: How Garden Tools Have Developed
As a gardener you can be found looking to buy garden equipment in the UK or maybe checking out your mother-in-law’s Bulldog lawn rake — but bear in mind, only over centuries have we come to this level. Trimmers and secateurs are relatively late inventions, but let’s not forget, gardens themselves are as old as man. What is now an everyday recreation actually began over 16,000 years ago. Primitive gardeners worked by a blend of practical reasons, spirituality, and pleasure. The necessary flowers and similar food-bearing plants would mingle with pools for fish. A small part of the garden was allotted for other things, holy plants planted and tended for use in religious ceremonies. Furthermore, other plants, important to the priests for religious and medicinal purposes, flourished elsewhere.
They were hardly the only nation to design early gardens. The list also includes the Babylonians, the Persians, not to mention the Assyrians, all of whom also incorporated buildings of noteworthy scope into landscapes. The Romans also went in for attractive gardens, though the Greeks did not. Food alone was grown in their plantations. While we’ll admit they wouldn’t have had rakes or garden forks, these cultures had innovated quite the selection of basic utensils akin to the hoes and spades gardeners rely on nowadays. Gardeners put them together using iron, bronze, copper, stone — the historical eras of course named for the raw materials in use. Progress was abruptly stopped under the pressure of the Dark Ages. Gardening suffered, but even then, the churches practiced the old knowledge, ready to be called on. Bit by bit we went back to designing gardens for pleasure. Guidelines began to emerge, a formalized structure governing how the garden should finally turn out. Some superb specimens can be found as knot gardens and hedge mazes, derived from labyrinthine patterns. Rules like these are no longer mandatory, so there’s ultimately no reason to worry — enjoy yourself, and stay confident regarding musing on how to fix that bothersome lawn rakes deformity or leafing through some lawn rake review. Humphry Repton and others looked at the guidelines — so set now that they were essentially frozen — and tossed away any that interfered with their plans, mingling a natural outlook with carefully selected statuary and similar accessories.
Today, gardens can look very different but we still cultivate plants for the same reasons as our ancestors. There’s no way you’ll discover a more comfortable place to be than a garden.
