Temple Garlands and Country Gardens — Your Storied Heritage
Really, as a gardener you can be found considering buying lawn rakes from the UK or maybe checking out your Alan Titchmarsh garden spades — but of course, it’s taken much of history to reach a point where you can. Settlements were gardening millennia before the lawn rake or the hoe. Your leisure occupation had its humble origins within the storied cradle of civilization. Gardens in those days were made for spirituality, for practical reasons, and of course pleasure. Generally protected by stone walls, fertile grounds were filled with flowers, vegetables, fruit and nut bearing trees, grapes, and sometimes even fish ponds. Some of the garden was allotted for other things, holy plant life seeded and nurtured in the name of their deities. Additionally, other herbs, important to the priests for medical purposes, flourished in places away from the gardens. They weren’t the only ones to design primitive farmsteads. Also gardeners were the Persians, the Assyrians, not to mention the Babylonians, who all also incorporated building projects of some scope into places. The Romans also went in for tranquil gardens, unlike the ancient Greeks. Food alone flourished in their plantations.
In that era, hoes and spades were the fresh innovations that lawn rakes or garden forks would become in times to come — and that’s before examining the kind of materials used. They used copper, bronze, stone, iron.
Progress was abruptly halted during the Dark Ages. Gardening suffered, but luckily, the monasteries kept the old knowledge and techniques alive. People once more constructed charming gardens using herbs, flowers, and vegetables for enjoyment. Standards began to emerge, a formalized structure dictating the way the garden would ultimately appear. Several great specimens still stand — knot gardens, drawn from intricate patterns. Such rules aren’t still the be-all and end-all, meaning there’s honestly no reason to be nervous — have fun, and don’t be embarrassed about trying to find out how to fix some annoying garden fork deformity or parsing some in-depth lawn rake review. Where others abided by these rules which had been codified over centuries, William Kent and others created a unique blend of informal and formal style by combining artificial garden decorations like columns with natural landscapes.
Today, gardens may look quite different but we still tend plants for many of the same reasons. There’s no way you’ll find a more comfortable setting than a garden.
