A tool--or three or four--for every purpose

The French love for diversity is no where so evident as in garden tools. In my explorations of French gardening's past and present, I've studied old French tool catalogues, developed a collection of antique French gardening tools (some of which I even offer for sale here from time to time), and tracked down artisanal French tool makers of today. The French passion for constantly inventing new gizmos while simultaneously maintaining traditions, combined with the country's intense regionality, combine to yield a plethora of garden tools perhaps unmatched in variety anywhere in the world.



It seems no task is too specific to merit its own French tool. The page from an old Truffaut catalogue at right includes both a hand hoe and a "serfouette" for onions. Just what is a serfouette? It's a tool that is a combined hoe and fork. As far as I know, we don't have a special name for it in English, so I have named the modern-day version of this tool that I offer for sale on this website a "combihoe". One of my tool suppliers, a very small enterprise in the south of France that employs about 20 forgerons (iron forgers or blacksmiths), lists a number of tools specifically for cultivating and cutting lavender, as well as an asparagus gouge (for cutting blanched asparagus below the soil line), a truffle pick, a cabbage cutter, a blackberry knife...







Just like cheeses, French garden tools vary drastically from region to region. The catalogue page at right shows a Norman hoe. As I know many people in Normandy who have never been to Paris (2 hours away), I am sure that Norman country folk still swear by their own hoe. Likewise, the catalogue page above of hand tools refers to a sarcloir façon Paris and a serfouette modèle Beauvais.







Those Parisians had their own way of doing things, and people in Beauvais weren't about to act like Parisians. My supplier in the south of France mentions tool models from Bastia (Corsica), the Piedmont (of Italy), Marseilles, , the Var, Savoie, Provence, Nice, and Dauphin. You can see from the place names that most of his clientele is from the South. Meanwhile, my supplier in Lorraine offers models specific to the traditions of locations in northern France.

Of course, it's more than stubbornness that has generated such wide regional variations among French gardening tools. Anyone who has traveled the length and breadth of France knows how incredibly varied is its terrain and of course its soils. This is what has led to the diversity of France's agricultural production. But these different soils, and the different crops they led to, also meant that each naturally evolved tools to meet local conditions. Everyone knows, for example, that for heavy clay soils, a fairly straight-bladed spade is best to keep the soil from sticking, while for sandy soils, you need a curved blade to allow you to scoop the friable earth.



You can see that there's not much difference in the trio of old hand tools from my collection (left) and those shown in the catalogue of 1914. And for that matter, on the pages of this web site, you can buy tools essentially just like them. The French gardener is not easily parted from tradition. My 1914 catalogue has two entire pages (photo right) of "flower gatherers" (cueille-fleurs), which bear witness to the importance of cutflowers to French gardeners of yesterday. Meanwhile, one of my tool suppliers offers just such a long-handled flower shear which I, in turn, offer to you. It is practically indistinguishable from the model in the middle of the page printed in 1914.



One of my favorite antique tool acquisitions is a classic French wooden wheelbarrow (brouette), painted a wonderful shade of green. The exact same form of barrow is shown in my 1914 catalogue (photo left below). A gardening magazine I subscribe to recently published plans for how to construct this same form, and I even found a commercial source for this classic wheelbarrow in kit form.





Tradition reigns strong in the world of French gardening tools, to the point where my supplier in southern France lists several tools whose names I cannot find defined even in my big Larousse French dictionary. The essade, for example, and its diminuitives, the essadonnet and the essadette, are variations on the form of the hoe, but with much longer, heavier blades which variably flare outward, taper, or even come to a point. My supplier offers 17 different ones! Other tools whose names are apparently no longer in common usage include the bechard and bechardon.

The raclette, for most French people, is a dish from the alps prepared by melting a certain cheese (also known as raclette) on a special grill and scraping off the melted part to eat on boiled potatoes. Note the scraping part of this operation, which is done with a special scraping tool. Likewise, the garden raclette is a sort of hoe specially adapted to using with a scraping motion just beneath the soil's surface to sever weed roots. My favorite version of this tool I offer on this web site, where I almost named it the "Batman hoe" due to its bizarre shape. (I opted, however, out of respect to the hoe's actual origin and also in the interest of marketing, to call it a Provençal hoe.) With four straight and two curved, razor sharp cutting edges, it is a weeding tool extraordinaire.

In fact, maybe it's the preponderance of gee-whiz weeding tools in the French repertoire that makes me such a fan of French tools. For if you ever show up unexpectedly at my garden, you will undoubtedly find at least part of it good and weedy. That's because I'm only there on (some) weekends, and because I insist on planting more garden than I can really handle in that amount of time. This last seems to be an intrinsic part of my gardening personality, as my lust for plants has always exceeded my capacity to take care of them. Therefore, I am always rescuing one part or another of my garden from disappearing under an onslaught of weeds. There's nothing I love more than good tools to arm me in this perennial battle.



Of course, each crop in France to some extent has generated its own special tools. Obviously, wine grapes are the best example. One of my most treasured antique tools is the vintner's tool kit pictured at right, containing special grapevine pruning shears, scissors for harvesting grapes, and a sharpening stone--all in a handmade wooden box fitted with a leather shoulder strap for carrying it with you when you go out to work in the vineyard.






But in Normandy you find special forks for harvesting sugar beets, as well as a similar tool adapted for prying out the dockweed that is everpresent in the clay soils of that rainy part of France. Likewise, there are special tools to cultivate the extremely rocky soils of the lavender fields of Provence. Fruit-growing regions of lots of variations of fruit-pickers (cueille-fruits, pictured from the 1914 catalogue at left and from my collection at right below). The French can be fairly said to be obsessed with fruit gardening, and it is still possible to buy special wooden racks for storing fruit through the winter, cloth bags for tying protectively over ripening fruit, and lots of other highly specialized paraphernalia that is pictured in old garden supply catalogues.

The French gardener, even today, is much less apt to turn to the gasoline motor to help him in the garden. Most gardening here is still done by hand, which probably goes a long way to explaining the rich variety of hand tools still manufactured today. When you aren't relying on a mini-rototiller to cultivate between your carrot rows, or on an 8-horsepower giant to turn over your garden in the spring, you're more likely to appreciate having exactly the right tool for the task at hand. And that, to me, is gardening à la française!

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Products of Interest:
Set of 5 'Lorraine' hand tools
Artisan watering can--Zinc and brass

Lorraine extended-reach pruners