101 uses (well, 10) for a garden knife

I do love my garden knife.

It's the one thing I wouldn't be without. It was probably the best freebie I've ever been given in all the years I've been a garden hack.

It looks exactly like the one in the picture. I can't even remember which particular press event it was: just that those nice people at Marshalls (and here's my chance - even if they have had to wait several years - to give them the mention they were no doubt after in exchange for the freebie) included one in a goody bag.

But I realised the other day that I very rarely actually use mine for proper gardening. I don't do much T-budding (for which you'd need a finer knife anyway); I find secateurs more useful for things like dead-heading; and I don't bother chipping seeds.

Gardening knives, I've discovered, aren't really for gardening at all. Oh no - they're much more useful than that, which is why I have mine in my pocket at all times. Here's what they are for:

• cutting up little bits of string for tying in sweetpeas (and beans, and peas, and achocha)
• hoicking those bits of hair and string and wool and stuff out of the brush on the vacuum cleaner
• gouging dirt out from under your fingernails
• acting as a stand-in screwdriver to undo the cross-head bolts on greenhouse staging
• ditto to tighten up the arms of your glasses when they come loose
• slitting open compost bags
• cutting x-shaped holes through planting membranes and into the tops of grow bags
• prising out mud from the treads of gardening boots
• going armed against potential thugs on the Underground while convincing police you're just a batty middle-aged gardener

What do you use yours for?

Waxing lyrical

When I'm not out in the garden, or writing about it, it seems I'm listening to things about it... This morning it was a little gem on Woman's Hour, on Radio Four, that caught my attention. It was an interview with garden historian Jenny Uglow in her suspiciously neat-sounding shed (she could get inside it, along with a radio reporter, for a start).

Jenny's delightful book, A Little History of British Gardening, is one of the treasures on my bookshelf. It's full of interesting things, and so was her interview on garden tools - as regular readers will know, I'm a bit of an anorak where the tools of my trade are concerned.

Anyway, did you know, for example, that painting your tools blue keeps flies off? Or that one of the daily tasks for Victorian estate gardeners was squeezing ants?

The report also had a little ditty which I just have to share - I'm sure everyone else has come across it already, but I had the delight of discovering it for the first time:

"From where the old thick laurels grow along the toolshed wall
You find the tool and potting sheds, which are the heart of all.
The cold frames, and the hothouses, the dungpits and the tanks,
The rollers, carts and drainpipes with the barrows and the planks,

And there you'll see the gardeners, the men and 'prentice boys,
Told off to do as they are bid, and do it without noise;
For except when seeds are planted and we shout to scare the birds,
The glory of the garden, it abideth not in words.

Our England is a garden, and such gardens are not made
By singing, "Oh, how beautiful!" and sitting in the shade.
Far better men than we go out and start their working lives
In grubbing weeds from gravel paths, with broken dinner knives."

I discover from Jenny's book that this is actually by Rudyard Kipling - it's called The Glory of the Garden. In case you're interested (the internet is a wonderful thing... but it does also encourage you to go on a bit) there's more:

"There's not a pair of legs so thin, there's not a head so thick,
There's not a hand so weak and white, nor yet a heart so sick,
But it can find some needful job that's crying to be done,
For the Glory of the Garden glorifieth every one.

Then seek your job with thankfulness and work till further orders,
If it's only netting strawberries or killing slugs on borders;
And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden,
You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hand and pray
For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!"

That's quite enough of that - ed.

Rake's progress

My desert-island garden tool - the one I'd never be without - is of course my pair of Felco secateurs, which don't often see the toolshed as they're almost always in my back pocket.

A close second, though, has to be my bamboo spring-tined lawn rake. Now, you'd have thought a spring-tined rake with a wooden head has to be in the same category as the chocolate teapot in the ideas stakes - but actually it works beautifully.

It's not as rough as a metal spring-tined rake, so you can collect leaves from lawns without actually pulling up the lawn itself while you're at it. And you can use the flexible bamboo hooks on the ends of the tines to tease leaves out of the crowns of shrubs, where otherwise they'd form a noxious rotting mess by spring, without actually damaging the shrubs themselves at all. Plastic ones come close for effectiveness, but quite apart from the aesthetics - I do hate plastic garden tools - I've never found one that doesn't crack after a few seasons' use. Yet my humble wooden one is still going strong after seven years of hard labour.

I was given mine, and have since found that none of the main manufacturers in the UK make them - the honourable exception being JB Bentley's Traditional Tool range. I have to say though mine is a bit better looking - you can see a pic of one just like it here. It may look a bit retro, but it really is the biz.