When you’re considering buying that lawn rake UK or checking out your Alan Titchmarsh garden forks, keep in mind that you couldn’t always purchase high-tech machines and garden accessories. Civilizations grew gardens millennia before the creation of the rake or the shears. This pastime traces its roots back to the storied cradle of civilization.
In Egypt gardeners were guided by a blend of practical reasons, spirituality, and pleasure. Usually protected by walls of stone, green spaces were tended to produce grapes, fruit and nut bearing trees, vegetables, flowers, and from time to time pools for fish. Admittedly the bulk was for food but they also tended some plants in the name of their gods. Still other roots, important to the priests for medical purposes, grew in places away from the gardens. They weren’t the only culture to produce early gardens. The list also includes the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians, and they are noted for incorporating buildings of some dimensions into landscapes. The Romans were another people who went in for attractive gardens, unlike the ancient Greeks. Food alone was allowed to flourish in their farmland. Though they wouldn’t have had garden forks or rakes, these tribes did use quite the range of basic contrivances and aids similar to the spades and hoes gardeners use in the present day. They were made from stone, bronze, copper, iron.
Progress screeched to a halt during the Middle Ages. Horticulture was no different, but even then, the priests practiced what had been learned. Little by little we returned to designing flower gardens for pleasure. Rules began to evolve, a formalized system overseeing how the garden should ultimately turn out. You only need to examine the work that goes into a knot garden for that to be manifest. Should you chance to be checking out how to mend that annoying garden forks deformity or reading some lawn rake reviews, consider that in the 1700s great talents such as Lancelot “Capability” Brown, William Kent, as well as Humphry Repton picked up a garden fork and the rest of the garden utensils to develop brilliant designs. Rather than abiding by gardening rules that were developed over centuries, William Kent and those like him uniquely mixed tradition and invention by combining modern garden accessories along the lines of statues with natural landscapes.
Yes, the situation has expectably advanced over the years, but gardens are still tended for the same reasons as our ancestors’. You’d be hard pushed to find a more peaceful setting than a garden.
