When you begin considering buying garden tools or marveling at your Alan Titchmarsh lawn rake, don’t forget that you couldn’t always purchase garden accessories and high tech devices. Rakes and secateurs are surprisingly recent adaptations, but you probably already know, the practice of gardening is as old as the human race. The activity we look at as an everyday recreation was already developing prior to the beginning of recorded history.

Gardens at that time were taken care of for pleasure, for spirituality, and we can’t leave out practical reasons. Generally protected by stone walls, fertile grounds were tended to produce fruit and nut bearing trees, flowers, vegetables, grapes, and from time to time pools for fish. A small part of the land was set aside, holy plants seeded and cultivated in honor of their gods. Temple functionaries also grew various herbs on nearby land. They weren’t the only ones to design ancient gardens. These include the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Persians, all of whom also incorporated buildings of some scope into this landscaping. As you might imagine, one other example of a culture who practiced this would be the Romans — though the Greeks focused on the food potential of their plantations alone.

Though we concede they may not have used a lawn rake or a fork, these cultures did employ a number of simple tools and accessories which were the prototypes of today’s hoes and spades. They were made from bronze, copper, stone, iron… the historical eras correspond well to the raw materials being employed.

Progress was abruptly stopped during the Dark Ages. Horticulture suffered, but luckily, the churches practiced the old techniques. Little by little we returned to the practice of engineering gardens to enjoy. Rules began to evolve, a formal system determining how the garden should ultimately turn out. You need only to appreciate the work invested in a knot garden or hedge maze for that to be manifest.

So if you’re searching for tips on how to get rid of that annoying garden spades deformity or browsing some lawn rake reviews, remember that things changed again when great talents like Humphry Repton, William Kent, as well as Lancelot “Capability” Brown picked up a garden fork and other garden contrivances to engineer astonishing designs. Where others abided by gardening guidelines that had been codified over centuries, Humphry Repton and those like him uniquely merged tradition and invention by bringing together artificial garden accessories such as statues with a realistic looking design. Today, gardens can look somewhat different but we still tend plants for much the same reasons. There’s no way you’ll find a more picturesque realm than a garden.