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 knives, a shovel, a billhook, and a wheelbarrow. The recognizable antecedents of many such forms are traceable back into human prehistory and across cultures. Appliances, however, are generally 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, gas canisters, and so on. The widespread consumption of devices that are not used to work the garden but have become clearly identifiable garden appliances is an even more recent innovation, and one that has gathered pace over the last 20 years or so.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that American homeowners annually spill 17 million gallons of gasoline while attempting to fill the tanks of power lawn tools and appliances

Source: iStockphoto

As with household tools and devices, the proliferation of garden tools into multiple lines of increasingly differentiated forms from competing manufacturers gathered pace during the 19th century, a consequence of the technological possibilities of industrialization, the super-productivity of reorganized labor, and the economic imperatives of capitalist political economy. Despite this expansion, there were relatively few genuine innovations, with the appearance in the mid-1800s of the manual lawn mower being a notable exception. Throughout the 20th century, proliferation and differentiation of recognizable tools into product lines was intensified further. This included both the addition of power—the gas-driven lawn mower, and later the electric lawn mower—and the development of alternative tools to achieve recognizable ends; for example, the widespread availability of the hover lawn mower in the 1960s, whereby a cylinder of blades rotating around a horizontal axis was replaced by a flat, circular blade revolving around a vertical axis.

As such, garden tools have been prey to the same ecological issues as tools in general. First, we can identify several forms of built-in obsolescence. Technological obsolescence is discernible in relation to cheap or value ranges of garden tools—their relatively low price is a direct consequence of decisions to use less durable, poorer-quality materials, inferior design, and quite often weak points, especially in the joining of components or materials. Moreover, garden tools and appliances have become increasingly styled, often with function being compromised by superficial stylistic elements. Even where functional efficacy is not compromised, highly styled garden tools are deemed by various promotional industries to have worn-out aesthetically and to be in need of replacement by functionally equivalent but new and superficially differing alternatives. Second, the overelaboration of traditionally [Page 177]simple garden tools is apparent; for example, complex and functionally vulnerable garden twine dispensers. Invitations to replace simple hand tools with powered alternatives are also commonplace; for example, the electric hedge trimmer for the hand shears, the leaf blower for the rake. The assumed and unquestioned universal benefits of technology have played a key role in the promotion of such alternatives.

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