05.04.10
The Right Tool for the Task at Hand — Ways the Tools of the Gardener Have Evolved
Sooner or later, any gardener starts pondering purchasing some lawn rake made in the UK or maybe marveling at some Bulldog garden forks — but of course, it’s taken centuries to reach a point where you can. Hoes and shears are relatively recent inventions, but don’t forget, the practice of gardening is as old as Man. What we know as an everyday hobby started to take shape over sixteen thousand years ago. In Egypt gardeners were guided by a blending of practical reasons, pleasure, and spirituality. The important grapes and similar edible plants would mingle with pools of fish. A section of this was set aside, sacred plant life grown and tended for use in religious ceremonies. Still other roots, important to the priests for mystical purposes, grew elsewhere.
Assyrians, Persians and Babylonians combined stunning architecture, flowers, nuts, and fruits with vegetables and water features to design glorious locations. As you’d predict, another nation like this would be the Romans — the Greeks, mind you, dedicated themselves to the potential for nutrition of their plantations and nothing else.
In that era, spades and hoes were the recent concepts that rakes and forks would be in times to come — and that’s before examining what raw materials they were made from. They used copper, iron, bronze, stone. The mayhem after the fall of Rome led many tribes to cast aside the elementary spade and other garden tools — except for the churches, who cultivated certain herbs.
Civilization once more engineered quaint gardens using vegetables, flowers, and herbs to provide an idyllic space. Standards began to evolve, a formal structure dictating how the garden would, in the end, appear. Several superb exemplars include hedge mazes, derived from complex textures and patterns.
Such rules are no longer the be-all and end-all, meaning there’s really nothing to worry about — enjoy yourself, and don’t be embarrassed about investigating how to fix some troublesome garden spades handle or reading some well written lawn rake review. Humphry Repton and others looked at the conventions — so fixed by that point as to be essentially fossilized — and discarded those that detracted from their plans, mixing a natural panorama with captivating statuary and similar accessories.
Certainly, things have expectably evolved as time moves on, but gardens are still cultivated for the same reasons as our forebears’. Regardless, they remain among the most peaceful settings in the world.
