The Keeper's Random Ramblings - Gardening Implements

If only tools could talk

This week Richard Bird (The Old Mole) drove from his home in Armidale NSW to deliver the first consignment of gardening tools and implements (approx 400) from his collection that he is gifting to Carrick Hill.  This will be the foundation collection of the Australia's Gardening Museum to be opened at Carrick Hill in 2014.   As he unloaded them from his novel designer trailer (see photo) he had a story about the function of each object or the unusal circumstances in which he acquired it or its function.

The amazing and endlessly interesting Richard Bird 'The Old Mole' unloading the collection from his wonderfully unique trailer.

  The past history of a particular tool is often lost and all we have is the marvellous patina of use and time but the Mole has ways of knowing and has recorded the provenance when he has divined or learnt it over the past fifteen years.

My granddaughter Madeline surrounded by the Old Mole's amazing collection of gardening tools.

Madeline and myself discovering some of the more quirky tools in the collection!

Carrick Hill garden is the most popular reason for attracting visitors to our dramatic hillside site over looking the city on the plains and beyond to Gulf St Vincent.  Cliff Jacob, the Haywards head gardener for forty seven years clipped by hand the hedges that surround the formal garden for the duration of his employment.  He would have seen the cypress plants when they were first bedded in, and at their current four metre height when he retired in 1984.  The new young head gardener, appointed to prepare the garden for the official opening in 1986, was John Draper. He offered Cliff one of the new motor powered hedge trimmers, but Cliff declined saying it was "too noisey and that he preferred to use his faithful hedge shears and do it properly by hand", all 103 metres of it.

We still have some of the shears Cliff used with their razor sharp blades and they will soon be seen in the stables where one of the stalls displays the role of horses in the garden (Yes! pooh for the roses). 

Carrick Hill's garden was begun in the 1930s but war interrupted things especially building the house and the Haywards did not move in until 1944.  By this time the gardeners had been at work planting and nurturing the young trees and shrubs which gave form to the landscape scheme devised by Ursula Hayward.  All this work would have been carried out with the classic basic hand tools.  No whipper snippers, rotary hoes or ride-on mowers.  In homage to the efforts of the first gardeners at Carrick Hill and all gardeners in Australia we are going to tell the story of the tools that did the job in every garden.  Their evolution and design, quirky stories of some very weird equipment and garden ornaments such as Australia's very own tyre swans. [Oz Garden History Society  & Goergeous Garden exhibition at Unley Museum]

Whether hoe, rake, spade or fork all have story to tell but the more obscure implements are fascinating in their anonimity.