Harold Sweetman, head of the Jenkins Arboretum, holds '50s dandelion tools: A Killer Kane (left), filled with herbicide applied directly to plant, and stabbers.
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They dig garden tools
Hand gadgets are reliably cool, some vintage gewgaws just ghoulish. And collectors simply drool for horticultural antiques.
Maybe, says Harold Sweetman, there are no new ideas when it comes to garden tools. No good ones, anyway.
Maybe the old standbys - spade, trowel, hoe, fork, pruner, saw - cannot be improved upon, though Lord knows, the marketplace keeps trying.
"It's not the tool that makes the gardener. It's the craft, and you only need a minimum number of tools to be successful," says Sweetman, director of the 46-acre Jenkins Arboretum in Devon and a subscriber to the IBM - or It's Better Manually - school of garden chores.
IBM is an easier sell if your chores don't entail 100-foot hedges and acreage out back. But for most of us, Sweetman insists, simple, well-made tools, powered by the hand that holds them and designed for a specific task, are all we need.
Guess there are no Speedy Weedys or Yard Butlers, leaf blowers or weed whackers in the Sweetman garage!
There are quite a few classics in there, along with some "unusual, useless, and downright hilarious" tools that will be shared at a Jenkins workshop tomorrow called "Cutting Edge Gardening."
Some of the tools in Sweetman's collection were donated to the arboretum. Some he bought at yard sales for $5 or less. And some he inherited from his father and grandfather, sheep farmers and gardeners in Colorado long ago.
And then there are the so-called goofy tools, the menacing weed-killers that resemble jaws of death. You step on a fulcrum and the thing bites into a weed, then plunges the carcass into a bucket.
It's bloodless, barely, unlike the 1950s-era lawn razor, which looks like a hand sickle with biblical roots and a horror-flick twist: 10 single-edge razor blades tucked into a curved blade and bolstered with screws.
It still has paint on it. "You can tell this tool never got used," Sweetman says, which may be a blessing. "I just am amazed that people invented these things."
To a novice, they're an interesting surprise, as is the discovery that there are folks out there willing to pay $600 for a vintage watering can. Turns out, old garden tools are much in demand by gardeners and collectors.
Long ago, they were coveted by almost everyone.
According to Sandy Levins, president of the Camden County Historical Society, garden tools were routinely included in colonial estate sales. The inventory from Pomona Hall, home of Camden's Cooper family, lists everything from a "ditching shovel" and garden shears to a "watering pott" and no fewer than four kinds of hoes.
"I was struck by the value our ancestors placed on garden tools," Levins says. "Unlike today, when we drive to our nearest garden center or home improvement megastore to replace a rusty pruner or grab a new plastic watering can.
"In 18th-century America, a largely agrarian society, well-crafted garden tools prepared, planted, and cultivated gardens that fed entire families," she says.
No wonder tools tempted thieves back then - and attract collectors today.
"It's getting more and more difficult to find these antique tools," says Paul Mrozinski, who owns Marston House Antiques in Wiscasset, Maine, with his wife, Sharon. He cites a craze for all things old and horticultural that took off in the mid-'90s and hasn't let up.
The Mrozinskis still carry a few English watering cans and clay pots from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but, Paul says, "no antique clippers and pruning shears, spades and pitchforks, the kinds of things that were used to actually manipulate the soil or prune a tree."
What about hose nozzles?
That's not a non sequitur. Hose nozzles are another garden accoutrement that some consider objets d'art. Michael Petrie, for one.
