Any gardener starts looking to buy garden equipment or perhaps checking out those Alan Titchmarsh garden spades — but of course, only over the majority of human history have we reached a point where you can. Rakes and shears are comparatively late adaptations, but let’s not forget, gardens themselves are as old as man. What we think of as an everyday recreation started to take shape over 16,000 years ago. These early gardeners worked by a mix of spirituality, practical reasons, and pleasure. The important fruit and nut bearing trees and other food-bearing plants would grow around pools for fish, being enclosed by walls of stone. While admittedly they consumed most of this they also tended some plants in the name of their deities. Still other plants, prized highly by the priests for medical purposes, were grown elsewhere.

They weren’t the only ones to create ancient plantations. Also gardeners were the Babylonians, the Persians, as well as the Assyrians, all of whom also incorporated building projects of significant scope into places. The Romans were another culture who thoroughly delighted in attractive gardens, unlike their antecedents the Greeks. They tended gardens strictly for food.

To them, hoes and spades were the recent labor savers that garden forks or Alexander Rose garden furniture would be in a later age — real differences even before taking into account what they used for materials. Spades were simple stone things to begin with, but were made out of bronze, copper, and iron as time passed. The chaos after Rome fell pushed later cultures to set aside the primitive spade and other garden tools — save for the churches, who planted some flowers.

The public once again designed quaint gardens using vegetables, flowers, and herbs for enjoyment. This trend went on up to the sixteenth century, by which time gardens were becoming increasingly formalized and structured. You only need to appreciate the work that goes into a hedge maze for that to be apparent.

Should you happen to be hunting for information how to mend some annoying garden spade deformity or browsing some interesting garden fork review, don’t forget that by the 18th century great talents like William Kent, Lancelot “Capability” Brown, as well as Humphry Repton relied on utensils like your own to develop stunning landscapes. Where others abided by gardening conventions that were codified over centuries, William Kent and those like him created a remarkable blend of structure and instinct by combining modern garden decorations along the lines of statues with a pastoral looking landscape.

In the present, gardens often look somewhat different but we still cultivate plants as our ancestors did. You won’t encounter a more picturesque realm than a garden paradise.