Garden Tools and Appliances

For the purposes of this article, garden tools are defined as those implements roughly equivalent to unpowered hand tools that are used to materially work the garden for functional or cosmetic purposes—spades, hoes, saws, and manual lawn mowers, for example. Appliances include both powered versions of tools and those powered devices that are employed in the garden but that are not used to materially work it—for example, gas-driven lawnmowers and patio heaters. Clearly, there will be some overlap between these categories.

[Page 176]One marked characteristic of garden tools is the historical longevity of their form, despite much historical variation in the purpose, form, and apprehension of gardens. For example, one 12th-century treatise on the subject advocated the acquisition of an essential garden toolkit that would include ...