As a gardener you can be found looking to buy garden equipment made in the UK or perhaps marveling at your Bulldog garden forks — but it’s worth pointing out, it’s taken centuries to reach this level. Settlements were gardening long before anyone dreamed up the lawn trimmer or the hoe. The activity we look at as a favorite leisure occupation actually began before the rise of the beginning of recorded history.

The Egyptians cultivated gardens for pleasure, for practical reasons, and we mustn’t leave out spirituality. The critical fruit and nut bearing trees as well as similar food-bearing vegetation would mingle with pools of fish. Granted they consumed the bulk of what was produced but they also cultivated some plants in the name of their deities. And other plants, treasured by the temples, grew elsewhere.

They weren’t the only nation to design primitive plantations. These include the Persians, the Assyrians, not to mention the Babylonians, and they often incorporated buildings of some scope into landscapes. As you’d imagine, another nation who practiced this would be the Romans — although the Greeks dedicated themselves to the potential for sustenance of their farmland alone.

To these tribes, spades and hoes were the recent concepts that garden forks and rakes would be in times to come — and that’s before you take into account what raw materials they relied on. They were made from copper, iron, bronze, stone… the historical eras of course named for the raw materials being employed. Progress was abruptly halted during the Middle Ages. Gardening suffered, but even then, the Church kept the old knowledge and techniques alive. Civilization began to cultivate quaint gardens employing vegetables, flowers, and herbs for enjoyment. Standards began to evolve, a formalized system controlling how the garden would ultimately appear. You only need to think about the work that goes into a hedge maze or knot garden to see this.

So if you should happen to be musing on ways to mend some vexatious lawn rake deformity or studying some well written garden fork review, don’t forget that things changed again when men like William Kent, Humphry Repton, as well as Lancelot “Capability” Brown relied on accessories like yours to construct astonishing designs. Instead of abiding by these conventions which had been codified over centuries, William Kent and others cunningly mixed tradition and invention by bringing together artificial decorative pieces such as columns with a natural looking design.

In the modern day, gardens may look quite different but we still tend plants for the same reasons as our forefathers. Ultimately, they are still among the most peaceful settings on earth.