Traditions of Gardening
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010Sooner or later, any gardener starts looking to buy garden equipment from the UK or maybe checking out some Alan Titchmarsh garden spades – but let’s not forget, it’s taken centuries to reach a point where you can. Rakes and shears are relatively recent tools, but don’t forget, gardens themselves are as old as humanity. This leisure occupation can trace its roots to the fabled cradle of civilization.
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The Egyptians made gardens for spirituality, for pleasure, and we shouldn’t leave out practical reasons. Typically confined by stone walls, fertile grounds were tended to produce flowers, vegetables, fruit and nut bearing trees, grapes, and sometimes pools for fish. Some of the land was allotted for other things, sacred plant life seeded and tended in honor of their gods. Priests, too, looked after various plants on nearby land. Babylonians, Persians and Assyrians mingled together vegetables, fruits, stunning architecture, and water features with flowers and nuts to construct beautiful areas. The Romans were another nation who truly delighted in tranquil gardens, unlike their forebears the Greeks. Food alone flourished in their plantations.
For them, hoes and spades were the fresh innovations that garden forks or lawn rakes would become in times to come – real differences even before considering what they used as raw materials. They were made of stone to begin with, but were made out of bronze, iron, and copper later on.
Progress was abruptly stopped under the pressure of the Middle Ages. Gardening suffered, but fortunately, the monasteries kept the old knowledge alive, ready to be called on by the wider world.
Gradually we discovered again the occupation of engineering gardens for pleasure. This habit advanced up to the sixteenth century, by which time gardens were becoming increasingly formalized and structured. You’ve only got to look at the work invested in a hedge maze or knot garden to see this.
So if you’re checking out how to get rid of that annoying garden spades handle or leafing through some well written garden spades review, consider that by the 18th century great talents such as Humphry Repton, William Kent, not to mention Lancelot “Capability” Brown relied on aids like yours to create mind blowing landscapes. Instead of abiding by gardening rules that were codified over hundreds of years, “Capability” Brown and others cunningly merged formal strictures with informal instinct by combining modern garden decorations such as columns with natural landscapes.
Obviously, things have evolved as time moves on, but gardens are still tended for much the same reasons. You’d be hard pushed to discover a more wonderful place to be than a garden paradise.