Country Gardens and Temple Garlands: Your Proud Heritage
As a gardener we’ll find you looking to buy garden tools or maybe marveling at that Bulldog garden spade — but let’s not forget, it’s taken much of history to reach these heights. Rakes and shears are relatively late innovations, but as you’re aware, gardens are as old as the human race. What is now a common leisure occupation was already developing before Ancient Egypt and the pyramids. Ancient peoples took care of gardens for pleasure, for practical reasons, and we mustn’t leave out spirituality. Generally enclosed by walls of stone, fertile grounds were tended to produce vegetables, fruit and nut bearing trees, grapes, flowers, and from time to time pools for fish. Granted the majority was grown as food but some plants were grown to honor certain gods. Still other roots, prized highly by the priests, grew on nearby land. Persians, Assyrians and Babylonians combined water features, nuts, flowers, and stunning architecture with fruits and vegetables to craft peaceful settings. As you might expect, another civilization like this was the Romans — the Greeks, however, focused on the potential for food of their farmland alone. While we grant you they had no access to forks or rakes, these cultures had invented quite the range of basic utensils which were the prototypes of the spades and hoes gardeners use nowadays. Hoes were initially hewn out of stone, but their replacements would fashion them in bronze, iron, and copper.
Progress was abruptly stopped under the pressure of the Middle Ages. Gardening suffered, but luckily, the monasteries practiced what had been learned, ready to be called on by the wider world.
Over time, people started to design quaint gardens grown from herbs, vegetables, and flowers to provide a pleasant enclosure. This habit went on throughout the seventeenth century, by which point gardens had become much more conventional and systematic. Many superb examples can be found as knot gardens and hedge mazes, which were drawn from dense textures and patterns.
Such rules aren’t still compulsory, meaning there’s ultimately nothing to worry about — enjoy yourself, and stay confident about trying to find out how to get rid of some annoying garden forks deformity or perusing some lawn rake reviews. Where others abided by gardening guidelines that had been carefully observed for hundreds of years, William Kent and others innovated a special mix of invention and tradition by combining modern decorative pieces such as columns with a pastoral looking design. Admittedly, the situation has changed over the generations, but gardens are still cultivated for the same reasons as our ancestors’. Regardless, they’re always some of the most beautiful settings on earth.