Garden Tools and Appliances

Definitions

Garden tools are implements roughly equivalent to unpowered hand tools and are used to materially work a garden for functional or cosmetic purposes. Examples of garden tools are spades, hoes, saws, and manual lawn mowers. Appliances include both powered versions of tools as well as those powered devices that are employed in the garden but are not used to materially work it. For example, both gasoline-driven lawnmowers and outside lighting systems are garden appliances. There is some overlap between these categories.

History

One marked characteristic of garden tools is the historical longevity of their form, despite much historical variation in the purposes, forms, and representation of gardens. For example, one 12th-century treatise on the subject advocated the acquisition of an essential garden tool kit, which would include knives, a shovel, a billhook, and a wheelbarrow. The recognizable antecedents of many such forms are traceable back into human prehistory and across cultures. The mattock, for example, is the tool of choice across much of the world and is used to chop, clear, dig, furrow, and weed. Appliances, on the other hand, are—with exceptions—historically recent inventions. The ability to power traditional hand tools has only come about via the development of portable power: batteries, electric cables, small gasoline engines, and gas canisters. The widespread consumption of those devices, which are not used to work the garden but have become clearly identifiable as garden appliances and accessories, is an even more recent innovation, one that has gathered pace since the 1980s. These include leaf blowers and powered hedge cutters, as well as water features, outdoor lighting, patio heaters, and even outdoor air conditioning.

The historical immutability of the material form of many garden tools is, to a large extent, inevitable. They endure because the tasks and labor associated with working the garden both for productive and cosmetic ends endures. Consequently, the proliferation of garden tools into multiple lines of increasingly differentiated forms from competing manufacturers did not gather pace until the 19th century. This was a result of the technological possibilities of industrialization, the productivity of reorganized labor, and the economic imperatives of capitalist political economy. Despite this expansion, [Page 310]there were relatively few genuine technical innovations. The reworking of existing technologies and incremental technical change was the basis of most differentiation. The appearance in the mid-1800s of the manual lawn mower was a notable and, for many, very welcome exception. Throughout the 20th century, the proliferation and differentiation of recognizable tools into product lines has intensified both quantitatively and qualitatively. This includes the addition of power (such as the gasoline-driven lawnmower and later the electric lawnmower) and the development of alternative tools to achieve the same ends; for example, the widespread availability of the hover lawn mower since the 1960s whereby a cylinder of blades rotating around a horizontal axis was replaced by a flat, circular blade revolving around a vertical axis.

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