Browse through an antiques shop and you’re likely to see a variety of tools — some familiar and others completely unrecognizable. Whether they were hand tools, such as a saw, or gardening tools, such as shovel, these implements were our ancestor’s most important possessions. There weren’t any superstores or mega-complexes of building and gardening supplies — these tools were custom made and hard to come by.

Ancient Times, Early Tools

Michael P. Garofalo has compiled “The History of Gardening: A Timeline from Ancient Times to the Twentieth Century” on his Web site, www. gardendigest.com. He notes that evidence from archeological sites suggests that man had knowledge of plants and plant gathering in 35,000 BC but did not cultivate them.

Around 10,000 BC there is evidence of plant domestication, but Garofalo says that “the first society in which people were primarily dependent on domesticated crops and livestock does not appear until about 6,000 years ago.” According to The New Oxford Book of Food Plants, certain cereals and legumes were domesticated in ancient times. In about 8,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent of the Near and Middle East (present-day Syria, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Jordan, Israel), wheat, barley, lentil, pea, bitter vetch, chick-pea, and possibly faba bean, were brought into cultivation by the Neolithic people.

The oldest tools in the world are those that have been used for the cultivation of the land. Early implements were primitive — and heavy.

It goes without saying that some of the oldest tools in the world are those that have been used for the cultivation of the land. Early implements were primitive — and heavy. Tools were typically made by the local blacksmith. There might have been local design preferences (since each blacksmith had his own creative eye) but the basic shapes haven’t changed that much. It wasn’t until the early 1600s that gardening tools became more popular, and not quite as cumbersome.

After the Industrial Revolution, gardening became the leisure occupation of middle-class town dwellers and the manufacture of garden implements and the mechanization of mowers began.

A Tool for Every Job

By the 1700s there was a tool for every purpose; in fact most of the hand tools used in the garden today were developed in this period. Early garden tool catalogs listed hundreds of task-specific tools
including dibbers, mattocks, potato hoes, onion hoes, daisy grubbers, claws, weeders, forcers, straighteners, garden row markers, garden reels, rakes, watering cans, water tanks, lawn mowers, lawn rollers, weed whackers and many more, states GardenOrnamenta, an English company that offers a range of antique tools and artifacts that are for use and for decoration.

Gardening was no longer a way to feed your family. After the Industrial Revolution, gardening became the leisure occupation of middle-class town dwellers and the manufacture of garden implements and the mechanization of mowers began. Soon, local preferences disappeared and tools became standardized — a trowel looked the same (a semicircular piece of metal with a handle) for gardeners across the globe.