July 31, 2010
The Story behind a Garden Fork Review
When you’re pondering buying garden equipment or checking out your Alan Titchmarsh garden spades, remember that you couldn’t always obtain garden tools and efficient machines. Rakes and shears are surprisingly new adaptations, but don’t forget, gardens themselves are as old as man. The activity we know as an everyday pastime first began before the beginning of recorded history. Gardens in that era were cultivated for practical reasons, for spirituality, and for pleasure. The vital flowers and similar food-bearing vegetation would grow around pools for fish, being enclosed by walls of stone. While admittedly the majority was grown as food some plants were tended to honor certain gods. And other plants, treasured by the priests for ritual purposes, flourished elsewhere.
Other cultures, too, were famous for the creation of ancient farmsteads. The list also includes the Persians, the Assyrians, as well as the Babylonians, who all also incorporated buildings of significant scope into this landscaping. The Romans were another tribe who went in for attractive gardens, but the Greeks were another matter. They cultivated plantations strictly to eat.
In that era, hoes and spades were the fresh innovations that rakes or forks would become in a later age — and that’s before considering what they used as materials. They were initially constructed from stone, but subsequent pieces would cobble them from copper, iron, and bronze. The pandemonium of the Middle Ages led several cultures to set down the simple spade and the rest of the garden tools — save for the churches, who planted some flowers for religious and pharmaceutical purposes. Gradually we went back to cultivating flower gardens to enjoy. This habit went on throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century, by which point gardens had become far more formal and systematic than previously. Many superb specimens can be found as knot gardens and hedge mazes, created from ornate patterns. Such rules are no longer the be-all and end-all, so there’s honestly nothing to fret about — enjoy yourself, and stay confident about musing on how to fix that troublesome garden forks deformity or leafing through some good Alexander Rose review. Where others abided by gardening rules that were studiously observed for generations, Humphry Repton and others uniquely mixed invention and tradition by bringing together artificial decorative pieces like statues with natural lines. Nowadays, gardens can look somewhat different but we still cultivate plants for the same reasons as our forebears. At the end of the day, they’re always some of the most beautiful spaces in the world.