May
2010
Temple Garlands & Country Gardens — the Gardener’s Storied Heritage
Sooner or later, any gardener starts looking to buy a garden fork in the UK or perhaps marveling at some Alan Titchmarsh lawn rakes — but it’s worth pointing out, it’s taken much of human history to reach these heights. Tribes cultivated gardens thousands of years before anyone dreamed up the garden hoe or the lawn trimmer. The activity we think of as a favorite hobby first began over sixteen thousand years ago. The Egyptians made gardens for spirituality, for practical reasons, and of course pleasure. Generally protected by walls of stone, fertile grounds were tended to produce flowers, grapes, fruit and nut bearing trees, vegetables, and from time to time even fish ponds. While admittedly they consumed most of this some plants were cultivated in the name of their gods. Priests, too, looked after various herbs on the surrounding land.
They weren’t the only civilization to landscape ancient gardens. These include the Persians, the Assyrians, not to mention the Babylonians, who all also incorporated buildings of some size into landscapes. As you’d think, one other civilization who practiced this would be the Romans — the Greeks, however, dedicated their efforts to the potential for sustenance of their farmsteads and nothing else.
In that era, spades and hoes were the fresh concepts that rakes and garden forks would become in times to come — real differences even before considering what materials they relied on. Hoes were initially hewn out of stone, but later pieces used bronze, copper, and iron. Everything was abruptly stopped under the pressure of the Middle Ages. Gardening suffered, but by good fortune, the Church kept what had been learned alive. Afterward, society began to grow charming gardens using vegetables, herbs, and flowers to provide an idyllic space. Standards began to evolve, a formal system overseeing how the garden should, in the end, turn out. You’ve only got to think about the artistry inherent in a knot garden to realize this. So if you chance to be investigating ways to remediate that vexatious lawn rakes deformity or browsing some informative garden spades review, remember that things changed again when visionaries such as Humphry Repton, William Kent, and Lancelot “Capability” Brown picked up a lawn rake and the rest of the garden implements to engineer mind blowing designs. William Kent and others took the conventions — so fixed now as to be metaphorically frozen — and discarded any that detracted from their plans, mingling a natural outlook with appropriate statues and other such decorative touches. In the modern day, the way they appear may have changed but we still tend plants as our ancestors used to. At the end of the day, they’re always some of the most picturesque spaces on earth.
