Sooner or later, any gardener starts looking to buy garden equipment or perhaps checking out that Gardeners’ Heaven garden spade - but let’s not forget, it’s taken centuries to reach this level. Hoes and shears are surprisingly late tools, but you probably already know, gardens themselves are as old as man. This pastime began within the cradle of civilization itself.
These early gardeners were guided by a mix of pleasure, spirituality, and practical reasons. Usually surrounded by walls of stone, fertile grounds were tended to produce grapes, vegetables, flowers, fruit and nut bearing trees, and from time to time even fish ponds. Admittedly the majority was for food but they also nurtured some plants to honor certain gods. Temple caretakers also grew certain herbs in sites far from the gardens.
Babylonians, Persians and Assyrians put together stunning architecture, fruits, water features, and flowers with vegetables and nuts to craft splendid landscapes. As you’d think, another example of a civilization like this was the Romans - while the Greeks dedicated their efforts to the potential for sustenance of their plantations rather than the esthetic. At that time, spades and hoes were the fresh concepts that forks or rakes would be in times to come - and that’s before considering what materials they were made from. Gardeners put them together using copper, iron, stone, bronze… the eras of history naturally named after the raw materials seeing use. The uproar of Europe’s Dark Ages drove several cultures to put down the basic hoe and the rest of the garden tools - save for the priests, who cultivated some herbs. Bit by bit we returned to the pastime of engineering flower gardens for pleasure. This movement advanced up to the sixteenth century, at which point gardens became increasingly formalized and systematic. You’ve only got to appreciate the work that goes into a hedge maze to realize this. Such rules aren’t still essential, meaning there’s honestly no reason to be nervous - have fun, and stay confident about investigating how to remediate that vexatious lawn rake deformity or studying some garden fork review. “Capability” Brown and those like him looked at the traditions - so fixed by then that they were essentially stagnant - and discarded any that detracted from their intent, blending a naturalistic panorama with interesting statues and other such accessories.
Nowadays, their appearance may have altered but nonetheless we tend plants for much the same reasons. Ultimately, they’re always among the most peaceful settings in the world.