Really, as a gardener we’ll find you considering buying garden equipment from the UK or perhaps marveling at your Bulldog garden forks — but let’s not forget, it’s taken much of history to reach this level. Rakes and secateurs are comparatively new innovations, but as you’re aware, gardens themselves are as old as Man. Your leisure occupation had its humble origins within the cradle of civilization itself. These early gardeners worked by a mix of pleasure, practical reasons, and spirituality. The vital flowers and other food-bearing plants would mingle with pools of fish, being surrounded by stone walls. While admittedly they ate most of this some plants were nurtured in the name of their gods. Still other plants, prized highly by the priests, grew elsewhere.
Assyrians, Persians and Babylonians combined nuts, vegetables, flowers, and fruits with water features and stunning architecture to create wonderful spaces. The Romans also went in for tranquil gardens, but the Greeks were a very different tale. Food alone was grown in their farmsteads. For them, hoes and spades were the new, unfamiliar concepts that forks or rakes would be for a later age — real differences even before taking into account the kind of materials used. Spades were simple stone things in the earlier years, but later pieces made use of iron, bronze, and copper.
Progress was abruptly stopped during the Middle Ages. Gardening suffered, but by good fortune, the monasteries practiced the old techniques, ready for when they would again be needed by the wider world. Next, civilization once again engineered exquisite gardens using vegetables, flowers, and herbs to provide a pleasant space. This trend went on right through the sixteenth and seventeenth century, by which point gardens had become increasingly conventional and structured. You’ve only got to look at the artistry inherent in a hedge maze or knot garden to see this. Rules like these aren’t still the be-all and end-all, meaning there’s honestly nothing to fret about — have fun, and stay confident regarding checking out how to fix that irritating lawn rake deformity or leafing through some interesting lawn rake review. Where others abided by gardening conventions which had been studiously observed for centuries, Humphry Repton and those like him innovated a remarkable blend of structure and instinct by bringing together artificial decorative pieces like columns with a pastoral looking landscape. In the present, gardens can look very different but we still grow plants as our forebears did. You’d be hard pushed to discover a more relaxing space than a garden.