Jessica Lunsford Blog

Sooner or later, any gardener starts looking to buy garden tools in the UK or perhaps marveling at some Alan Titchmarsh garden spades — but it’s worth pointing out, it’s taken much of human history to reach these heights. Hoes and secateurs are surprisingly new inventions, but you probably already know, the practice of gardening is as old as man. This pastime got started within the cradle of civilization itself.

In Egypt gardeners were guided by a mix of pleasure, practical reasons, and spirituality. Generally surrounded by stone walls, green spaces were filled with vegetables, fruit and nut bearing trees, flowers, grapes, and occasionally even fish ponds. While admittedly the majority was for food some plants were nurtured in the name of their gods. Still other herbs, treasured by the priests for religious and medicinal purposes, grew in places away from the gardens.

They weren’t the only culture to develop early gardens. These include the Persians, the Assyrians, to say nothing of the Babylonians, all of whom also incorporated buildings of noteworthy dimensions into gardens. The Romans also really delighted in tranquil gardens, unlike the ancient Greeks. Food alone flourished in their farmsteads. While we’ll admit they wouldn’t have had rakes or garden forks, these tribes did use quite the range of elementary implements and garden accessories which were prototypical of modern hoes and spades. Spades were initially hewn out of stone, but their replacements made use of iron, bronze, and copper. The pandemonium of Europe’s Middle Ages pushed many cultures to set down the simple hoe and all the other garden tools — except for the churches, who cultivated certain herbs and flowers for pharmaceutical and religious needs.

Society once more designed charming gardens employing herbs, flowers, and vegetables to provide a pleasant space. This habit advanced right through the sixteenth and seventeenth century, at which point gardens became increasingly conventional and structured. Some awesome representations include knot gardens and hedge mazes, which were inspired by dense patterns.

Rules like these aren’t still mandatory, meaning there’s ultimately no reason to worry — enjoy yourself, and stay confident about musing on how to fix some vexatious Alexander Rose deformity or browsing some well written lawn rake reviews. William Kent and those like him glanced at the guidelines — so codified by that point as to be practically frozen — and ignored those that interfered with their vision, mixing a natural outlook with interesting statues and other such decorative touches.

Nowadays, their appearance may have altered but nonetheless we tend plants for many of the same reasons. At the end of the day, they are still among the most peaceful spaces on earth.