Every time you’re looking to buy garden spades from the UK or marveling at that Bulldog garden fork, don’t forget that gardening hasn’t always been filled with garden accessories and fancy devices. Trimmers and secateurs are surprisingly new developments, but don’t forget, the concept of gardens is as old as the human race. Your leisure occupation began within the famous cradle of civilization. Ancient peoples cultivated gardens for pleasure, for spirituality, and of course practical reasons. The important flowers and other food-bearing plants would grow around pools of fish. While admittedly they consumed most of this they also cultivated some plants to honor some of their gods. Additionally, other herbs, important to the temples, grew on nearby land. They were hardly the only tribe to design primitive farmsteads. The list also includes the Assyrians, the Persians, to say nothing of the Babylonians, who all also incorporated buildings of some size into places. As you might imagine, one other nation like this would be the Romans — though the Greeks dedicated themselves to the food potential of their plantations rather than the esthetic. While they may not have used a rake or a fork, these cultures did employ quite the range of basic contrivances which were the prototypes of modern hoes and spades. Tools were initially hewn out of stone, but were made out of copper, iron, and bronze as time passed.
The uproar after Rome fell drove several tribes to set aside the simple garden fork and the rest of the garden tools — except for the churches, who planted certain herbs and flowers for religious needs.
Bit by bit we went back to cultivating gardens for pleasure. This movement continued throughout the 16th and 17th century, by which point gardens were becoming increasingly formalized and precise. You’ve only got to think about the work that goes into a knot garden or hedge maze to realize this.
Rules like these aren’t still mandatory, and as such there’s honestly nothing to worry about — have fun, and stay confident when it comes to investigating how to fix some troublesome garden furniture deformity or parsing some well written lawn rake review. William Kent and those like him examined the guidelines — so fixed now as to be metaphorically stagnant — and ignored any that detracted from their intent, mixing a realistic outlook with carefully selected statues and similar decorative touches. Today, gardens can look somewhat different but we still cultivate plants for the same reasons as our forefathers. You’d be hard pushed to discover a more peaceful realm than a garden.