When you start looking to purchase garden tools or checking out that Alan Titchmarsh garden spade, remember that gardening hasn’t always been packed with garden tools and efficient machines. Tribes cultivated gardens thousands of years before anyone dreamed up the lawn trimmer or the garden hoe. This leisure occupation traces its roots back to the fabled cradle of civilization.

These early gardeners worked by a blending of spirituality, pleasure, and practical reasons. Usually confined by walls of stone, green spaces were tended to produce vegetables, grapes, fruit and nut bearing trees, flowers, and occasionally pools for fish. A section of the land was allotted for other things, sacred plants seeded and tended for use in religious ceremonies. Additionally, other herbs, important to the temples for religious and medicinal purposes, grew in places far from the gardens.

Others, too, were known for the production of early plantations. The list also includes the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians, all of whom also incorporated buildings of noteworthy scope into places. As you might predict, another nation like this would be the Romans — the Greeks, on the other hand, concentrated on the potential for nourishment of their farmland rather than the visual. For these nations, spades and hoes were the fresh concepts that lawn rakes or garden forks would become in times to come — real differences even before you examine what they used as raw materials. Gardeners put them together using iron, stone, copper, bronze — the ages of history obviously named after the raw materials seeing use. Everything was abruptly halted under the pressure of the Middle Ages. Gardening was no different, but fortunately, the clergy practiced what had been learned, ready for when they would again be needed. Slowly we rediscovered the hobby of constructing gardens for pleasure. This trend continued up to the seventeenth century, at which point gardens became increasingly established and systematic. Several great exemplars can be found as knot gardens and hedge mazes, which were drawn from complex patterns.

Should you chance to be investigating ways to mend that vexatious garden spades handle or leafing through some garden fork review, don’t forget that by the 1700s visionaries such as Lancelot “Capability” Brown, William Kent, not to mention Humphry Repton turned to contrivances like yours to make real astonishing gardens. “Capability” Brown and others glanced at the traditions — so codified now that they were practically stagnant — and tossed away those that interfered with their plans, mixing a naturalistic panorama with carefully selected statuary and similar accessories.

In the present, the way they appear may have changed but nonetheless we cultivate plants for many of the same reasons. Regardless, they remain some of the most wonderful spaces in the world.