The Cash Trio

Next time you’re looking to buy garden equipment or checking out your Bulldog garden spades, don’t forget that you couldn’t always buy high-tech machines and garden accessories. Settlements grew gardens thousands of years before the invention of the lawn trimmer or the fork. This recreation began within the cradle of civilization itself.

Ancient Egyptians cultivated gardens for practical reasons, for pleasure, and we can’t ignore spirituality. Typically enclosed by walls of stone, green spaces were tended to produce fruit and nut bearing trees, flowers, vegetables, grapes, and often pools for fish. While admittedly the bulk was for food they also grew some plants in the name of their deities. Priests, too, looked after other plants on nearby land.

Other tribes, too, became known for the development of primitive gardens. Also active were the Persians, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians, all of whom also incorporated buildings of significant dimensions into places. The Romans were another people who genuinely delighted in attractive gardens, though the Greeks did not. They grew farmland purely to eat.

While we’ll admit they may not have used a lawn rake or a garden fork, these tribes had devised quite the range of elementary contrivances which were the prototypes of modern hoes and spades. Gardeners put them together using copper, stone, iron, bronze… the eras of history sync well to the raw materials in use.

Everything slowed to a halt during the Dark Ages. Gardening suffered, but luckily, the monasteries kept everything that had been learned alive. Next, society once again constructed quaint gardens using vegetables, herbs, and flowers for enjoyment. This trend advanced right through the 1500s, at which point gardens became increasingly conventional and systematic. You only need to think about the artistry inherent in a knot garden or hedge maze for that to be obvious.

Should you chance to be searching for tips on ways to fix some troublesome garden forks deformity or parsing some informative lawn rake review, don’t forget that by the 1700s men such as William Kent, Lancelot “Capability” Brown, and Humphry Repton turned to utensils like your own to engineer stunning designs. Humphry Repton and those like him examined the guidelines – so codified by that point that they were essentially fossilized – and ignored any that detracted from their plans, blending a natural outlook with appropriate statues and similar decorative touches.

Certainly, things have changed as time rolls on, but gardens are still tended for the same reasons as our forebears’. You won’t encounter a more picturesque place to be than a garden paradise.