Digging: Those who work regularly in the yard understand how important it is to have just the right shovel, spade or rake.
To a gardener, tools are gorgeous. People may think there's nothing special about a shovel, but a gardener's spade is not just a spade. It's a beloved collaborator in the work of turning a yard into a garden.
Tools are not often put on display in a garden, but good gardeners admire as well as use them.
"The best gardeners need very few tools, but they need good tools," says Jack Allen, whose interest in having the right tools landed him a job as the tool expert at Smith & Hawken, the retail and mail-order gardening specialty company.
"Of course, you need a good spade, pruning shears and a rake," he says. "But really good gardeners could grow things with a pointed stick."
A gardener once showed Allen a tool her grandfather had made. It looked like a cross between a cricket bat and a golf putter, he says, and it could be used for digging, weeding, raking, planting and cultivating.
"It was her favorite tool," he says. "But this woman could garden with her fingernails."
Tool racks at garden shops seem especially appealing in the fall. There are leaves to rake, bulbs to plant, new beds to dig and mulch before the winter.
Among the familiar shovels, hoes and shears, bright and new, there always is some clever design, revolutionary material or ingenious new idea that just might make it even more pleasant to spend a day with your hands in the dirt. "The hot categories are always the gadget categories," Allen says. "The temptation is always there to go away from the classics."
But tools designed along the lines of the Swiss Army knife, with a trowel on one end and a rake on the other, for example, inevitably feel awkward in the garden. Bulb planters designed to simplify the task of planting 100 tulips seldom work any better than a trowel or a shovel.
Most tools actually haven't changed that much over the years.
"People have been gardening in the current form for a couple of hundred years, and all the tools are very mature," Allen says. "They have been refined to a highly evolved state."
The traditional shapes, heft and jobs of various tools are as familiar to gardeners as a wooden spoon and a paring knife are to a chef. You can buy rakes with colorful plastic, steel or bamboo tines, or trowels made out of cast aluminum, plastic or steel, but their functions -- and, by and large, their forms -- remain the same.
