A Market Spell

Any gardener starts looking to purchase garden tools or alternatively marveling at that Alan Titchmarsh garden fork – but let’s not forget, it’s taken the majority of human history to reach this level. Hoes and shears are surprisingly late developments, but let’s not forget, the concept of gardens is as old as Man. Your pastime can trace its roots to the fabled cradle of civilization. Ancient peoples tended to gardens for spirituality, for pleasure, and we mustn’t omit to mention practical reasons. Typically protected by stone walls, green spaces were seeded with vegetables, grapes, fruit and nut bearing trees, flowers, and occasionally even fish ponds. A section of the garden was allotted for other things, sacred plant life planted and nurtured in honor of their deities. Still other roots, prized highly by the temples for magical purposes, were grown elsewhere. Other civilizations, too, were famous for the creation of early gardens. The list also includes the Assyrians, the Persians, to say nothing of the Babylonians, and they often incorporated building projects of some dimensions into this landscaping. As you’d imagine, one other example of a culture like this would be the Romans – the Greeks, mind you, concentrated on the potential for nutrition of their farmsteads rather than the esthetic.

At that time, spades and hoes were the modern, recent innovations that forks and lawn rakes would be in times to come – real differences even before looking at what raw materials they relied on. They used copper, iron, bronze, stone – the historical eras sync well to the primary materials being employed.

Everything was abruptly stopped under the pressure of the Dark Ages. Gardening was no different, but even then, the Church practiced what had been learned. Little by little we went back to cultivating gardens to enjoy. This movement advanced up to the 1500s, at which point gardens became increasingly formalized and systematic. You need only to contemplate the work that goes into a knot garden to see this.

Rules like these aren’t still mandatory, so there’s ultimately nothing to worry about – have fun, and don’t be embarrassed regarding trying to find out how to get rid of that annoying garden spades deformity or parsing some interesting lawn rake review. “Capability” Brown and those like him glanced at the conventions – so fixed now that they were effectively stagnant – and threw away those that interfered with their intent, combining a realistic panorama with captivating statues and similar accessories. Certainly, the situation has expectably changed as time rolls on, but gardens are still loved for much the same reasons. You won’t encounter a more wonderful setting than a garden.