Country Gardens and Temple Garlands — the Gardener’s Storied Heritage
Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010Whenever you’re pondering buying garden tools or marveling at your Alan Titchmarsh garden forks, don’t forget that it’s only recently that gardeners have had access to garden accessories and streamlined devices. Settlements were gardening millennia before anyone dreamed up the rake or the garden fork. Your pastime can trace its roots to the cradle of civilization itself.
Ancient peoples took care of gardens for practical reasons, for spirituality, and we shouldn’t leave out pleasure. The necessary fruit and nut bearing trees and other edible vegetation would grow around pools for fish. While admittedly they consumed most of this they also cultivated some plants in the name of their deities. Still other roots, important to the temples for ritual purposes, flourished in sites far from the gardens.
Persians, Babylonians and Assyrians combined stunning architecture, vegetables, nuts, and water features with fruits and flowers to design wonderful landscapes. The Romans also went in for attractive gardens, unlike the ancient Greeks. They grew gardens solely for sustenance.
In that era, hoes and spades were the recent labor savers that garden forks and lawn rakes would become for a later age — real differences even before contemplating the kind of materials used. Spades were simple stone things in the earlier years, but subsequent pieces made use of copper, iron, and bronze.
The pandemonium after the fall of Rome drove later nations to put down the simple garden fork and other garden tools — save for the priests, who tended certain flowers and herbs for medicinal and religious purposes. Little by little we went back to designing flower gardens for pleasure. This habit continued up to the 1600s, by which time gardens had become increasingly conventional and structured. You’ve only got to look at the work that goes into a hedge maze or knot garden for that to be evident.
Rules like these are no longer essential, so there’s ultimately nothing to worry about — have fun, and stay confident about investigating how to mend that troublesome garden spades deformity or browsing some informative garden fork reviews. “Capability” Brown and those like him examined the conventions — so set now that they were metaphorically stagnant — and ignored those that obstructed their intent, mixing a naturalistic panorama with interesting statuary and other such decorative touches.
Nowadays, their appearance may have altered but we still tend plants as our ancestors did. You won’t find a more picturesque space than a garden paradise.