A Restless Bunch

Really, as a gardener you can be found looking to buy some lawn rake in the UK or maybe checking out your Alan Titchmarsh garden spades - but let’s not forget, only over centuries have we reached a point where you can. Civilizations grew gardens thousands of years before anyone dreamed up the fork or the trimmer. What is now an old familiar recreation first began prior to the beginning of recorded history.

Ancient Egyptians cultivated gardens for practical reasons, for pleasure, and for spirituality. The important fruit and nut bearing trees and similar edible vegetation would grow around pools for fish. Certainly they consumed most of the produce but some plants were grown to honor some of their deities. Still other roots, important to the priests, grew on nearby land. They weren’t the only nation to create ancient farmsteads. Also gardeners were the Babylonians, the Assyrians, and the Persians, who all also incorporated buildings of noteworthy size into this landscaping. The Romans also thoroughly delighted in attractive gardens, but the Greeks were a different tale. They tended farmland solely for sustenance. In that era, hoes and spades were the recent labor savers that forks or lawn rakes would be in a later age - real differences even before taking into account the kind of materials employed. They used copper, bronze, stone, iron… the historical ages of course named after the primary materials seeing use.

The chaos following the fall of Rome drove many tribes to set aside the basic hoe and all the other garden tools - except for the priests, who tended some flowers and herbs.

Bit by bit we returned to the hobby of engineering gardens for pleasure. This movement went on throughout the sixteenth century, by which time gardens were becoming increasingly conventional and structured. You’ve only got to look at the work that goes into a hedge maze for that to be evident. So if you’re checking out ways to fix some irritating lawn rake deformity or browsing some garden spades review, take a moment to reflect that in the 18th century visionaries like Lancelot “Capability” Brown, Humphry Repton, and William Kent relied on tools like your own to create mind blowing landscapes. Where others abided by gardening rules that had been studiously observed for centuries, William Kent and those like him created a special mix of invention and tradition by placing together artificial garden decorations along the lines of columns with a realistic looking design.

Today, gardens often look somewhat different but nonetheless we grow plants as our forebears did. Nonetheless, they are still among the most peaceful settings in the world.