As a gardener you can be found pondering buying lawn rakes in the UK or maybe checking out your Bulldog lawn rakes — but bear in mind, it’s taken the majority of history to reach a point where you can. Trimmers and shears are comparatively recent innovations, but let’s not forget, the concept of gardens is as old as man. What is now an everyday hobby was already developing before Ancient Egypt.
The Egyptians created gardens for spirituality, for practical reasons, and of course pleasure. The vital fruit and nut bearing trees as well as similar edible vegetation would grow around pools of fish, being surrounded by stone walls that also added form. Some of the land was allotted for other things, sacred plant life seeded and tended for use in religious ceremonies. And other plants, important to the temples, flourished in places far from the gardens. Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians combined fruits, flowers, nuts, and water features with stunning architecture and vegetables to design splendid park lands. As you might imagine, another example of a nation who practiced this was the Romans — while the Greeks dedicated themselves to the potential for nourishment of their farmsteads and nothing else.
While they would not have used a rake or a garden fork, these cultures did employ quite the selection of elementary accessories not dissimilar to modern hoes and spades. Spades were initially constructed from stone, but their replacements used copper, bronze, and iron.
Progress screeched to a halt during the Dark Ages. Horticulture suffered, but fortunately, the clergy practiced what had been learned, ready to be called on by the wider world.
Slowly we returned to cultivating gardens to enjoy. This trend continued throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century, by which time gardens had become far more conventional and structured. You have only to examine the artistry inherent in a knot garden for that to be evident. So if you’re investigating ways to mend that troublesome garden spade deformity or leafing through some in-depth garden fork reviews, don’t forget that by the 1700s great talents such as William Kent, Lancelot “Capability” Brown, and Humphry Repton turned to contrivances like yours to develop mind blowing landscapes. Where others abided by gardening guidelines which had been developed over centuries, William Kent and those like him cunningly merged tradition and invention by placing together artificial decorative pieces like statues with natural landscapes.
Certainly, things have changed as time moves on, but gardens are still popular for many of the same reasons. At the end of the day, they’re always some of the most relaxing settings on earth.
