When you’re pondering buying garden spades from the UK or marveling at some Alan Titchmarsh garden spades, don’t forget that gardeners have only recently been able to get hold of garden accessories and high-tech devices. Rakes and secateurs are relatively late inventions, but let’s not forget, gardens are as old as Man. The activity we look at as an everyday hobby was already developing over 16,000 years ago.
In Egypt gardeners were guided by a blending of spirituality, practical reasons, and pleasure. The necessary grapes as well as other edible vegetation would mingle with pools of fish, being enclosed by walls of stone that also added shape and definition. While admittedly the bulk was for food some plants were nurtured in the name of their gods. Temple officers also grew certain roots on nearby land.
Babylonians, Assyrians and Persians combined stunning architecture, fruits, vegetables, and flowers with nuts and water features to design glorious spaces. As you’d think, another culture who practiced this was the Romans — although the Greeks concentrated on the food potential of their farmsteads rather than the esthetic.
For them, spades and hoes were the fresh innovations that forks or rakes would be in times to come — and that’s before you examine the kind of materials employed. Gardeners wrought them from bronze, copper, stone, iron.
Everything was abruptly halted during the Dark Ages. Gardening was no different, but luckily, the Church practiced what had been learned, ready to be called on. Little by little we went back to constructing gardens for pleasure. Guidelines began to emerge, a formal system dictating how the garden would finally turn out. Many excellent specimens include knot gardens and hedge mazes, which were inspired by intricate patterns.
Should you chance to be musing on how to fix that annoying Alexander Rose furniture problem or perusing some well written lawn rake reviews, take a moment to reflect that as time went on visionaries such as William Kent, Humphry Repton, not to mention Lancelot “Capability” Brown relied on implements like yours to engineer amazing gardens. Humphry Repton and those like him examined the rules — so fixed now as to be effectively stagnant — and discarded those that detracted from their intent, mingling a naturalistic panorama with appropriate statues and similar accessories.
Nowadays, their appearance may have altered but nonetheless we cultivate plants for similar reasons to our forefathers. You won’t encounter a more picturesque setting than a garden paradise.
