August
2010
The Perfect Tool for the Job: How Garden Tools Have Evolved
Any gardener starts looking to buy garden tools UK or perhaps marveling at your neighbor’s Bulldog garden fork — but of course, it’s taken the majority of human history to reach a point where you can. Rakes and shears are comparatively recent innovations, but let’s not forget, the concept of gardens is as old as Man. Your leisure occupation had its humble origins within the cradle of civilization itself.
Gardens in those days were cultivated for practical reasons, for pleasure, and of course spirituality. Typically confined by walls of stone, green spaces were tended to produce fruit and nut bearing trees, vegetables, grapes, flowers, and perhaps pools of fish. While admittedly they consumed most of this they also grew some plants to honor some of their deities. Priests also looked after other roots in places away from the gardens.
Other nations, too, came to be known for the design of ancient farmsteads. Also active were the Assyrians, the Babylonians, not to mention the Persians, all of whom also incorporated building projects of noteworthy dimensions into landscapes. As you might expect, another example of a nation who practiced this would be the Romans — the Greeks, mind you, dedicated their efforts to the food potential of their farmsteads and nothing else. Though they may not have used a rake or a fork, these civilizations had invented a variety of primitive tools not dissimilar to today’s hoes and spades. Gardeners shaped them from copper, iron, stone, bronze. The uproar following the fall of Rome pushed later civilizations to cast aside the simplistic spade and the rest of the garden tools — except for the priests, who cultivated certain herbs and flowers.
Slowly we went back to growing flower gardens to enjoy. Conventions began to emerge, a formal structure determining how the garden should ultimately turn out. You’ve only got to contemplate the artistry inherent in a knot garden for that to be apparent.
So if you’re checking out how to fix that irritating garden forks deformity or parsing some interesting garden spades review, consider that in the 1700s visionaries like Lancelot “Capability” Brown, Humphry Repton, as well as William Kent relied on contrivances like your own to make real amazing landscapes. Where others abided by gardening guidelines that had been rigorously observed for generations, Humphry Repton and others cunningly mingled structure and instinct by combining artificial garden decorations along the lines of columns with a natural looking design. Obviously, the situation has evolved as time moves on, but gardens are still tended for similar reasons to our ancestors’. There’s no way you’ll encounter a more relaxing area than a garden.
