When it comes to making the perfect garden tool, the past has all the answers

Lovers of old and antique garden tools, prized for their ergonomic design and hard-wearing good looks — not to mention the history they embody — will be familiar with Garden & Wood, which is run by Piers Newth and Louise Allen. They met as horticultural trainees at RHS Wisley in Surrey and ended their gardening careers at the Oxford Botanic Gardens. Kew-trained, she was curator of the gardens, overseeing horticultural and education staff, including a lot of fundraising, and he was in charge of the arboretum.

When Piers found he was spending as much time at his desk as he did outdoors, he remembered ruefully that during lessons at school he always gazed out of the window, because he really hated being inside. Meanwhile, Louise was sacrificing most of her free evenings and weekends searching for possible speakers because courses and lectures were such a good source of income for the garden. It was when they found themselves heading for Ledbury in Herefordshire on Piers’s birthday, to vet yet another possible speaker, that they began to have dreams of leaving. Quite what they would do without regular wages was not clear, but they told one another that ‘something would come up’.

What did come up was the day that Piers took a hurdle-making course and noticed how easily the instructor was cleaving the hazel branches. He asked if he could try the vintage billhook that his teacher was using. Unlike the modern version, which had been giving him tennis elbow, working with the borrowed tool was pain free, so he begged to buy it. It was an easy step to the discovery that well-made garden implements from the 1940s and 1950s were undervalued. Twenty years ago, junk shops were full of discarded forks and trowels and, as he was good at restoring the rusty or broken tools, the pair began to accumulate a collection. Could this offer a possible future that would allow them to work at home together?

They launched Garden & Wood in 2008 and began in a small way by taking a stand at the Cottesbrooke Hall garden fair in Northamptonshire: ‘It was beautiful, with real grass on the tables and matching umbrellas.’ The repaired tools sold steadily and, encouraged by the reaction at Cottesbrooke, they booked a stand at RHS Chelsea Flower Show in their holiday week. After two years of juggling work and trading vintage tools at plant fairs in their spare time, in 2010, they finally left the Botanic Gardens. At last, they could live and work in the same place, with no overheads. It was a much simpler life that became even easier with the coming of online trading.

The business has been expanding ever since and, two years ago, they realised that operations were becoming increasingly restricted by the small site around their pretty thatched cottage in Oxfordshire. When a former sawmill near Chippenham in Wiltshire came up for sale, it seemed the perfect option, with space for both living and a workshop under the same roof.

The flair and style that Garden & Wood brought to its Chelsea stands won it the Director General’s Award in 2024 and a visit to the sawmill shows these same qualities in the display of vintage wares: the workshop and vegetable plot with its repurposed greenhouse and rescued railings are immaculately stylish. When asked what governs what they sell, the owners reply: ‘Anything to do with gardening that was produced in the past.’ This might stretch from rare sprinklers — which are regularly collected by an American judge — to colourful seed packets and lead garden miniatures.

Between these extremes are the everyday useful tools that have been given a new handle or been cleaned and sharpened in the workshop. Once they have been through Piers’s hands, they return to being tools that will last and that are better and easier to use than many modern examples. Old secateurs and shears, however, tend to be collectors’ pieces because they will never do the job as well as new ones, so Piers recommends Felco secateurs for proper pruning. Ladies’ border forks are popular items (but I hanker for a ladies’ mattock, like the one I saw in the Bloomsbury exhibition at the Garden Museum last year. It had belonged to Vita Sackville-West and her initials were carved into the handle). Sometimes people bring their own favourite tools to be revived, but, sadly, quite often the work on these turns out to be a labour of love.

Terracotta pots are a particular speciality, with hand-thrown Sankey pots the most prized. It is, they say, hard to keep up with the demand for pots in all sizes. Occasionally, they find large orchid pots with several holes in the base. For the rarest items, they travel all over the British Isles, as well as to Europe. Recently, a collector from Germany has contacted them wanting to sell all his stock, which they find exciting. ‘What we like best,’ Louise says,’ is something we have never seen before.’

Now that they have more space, garden furniture, as well as larger items, can be stored and displayed. There are elegant, but strong antique tables and chairs, water bowsers on wheels and huge coppers for planting. Iron plant stands, cloches and galvanised watering cans are usually in stock. The best items are photographed and put on Instagram and they go quickly. Some designers have an alert from Garden & Wood so that they can be sure of securing things first. Fashion insiders, such as the new creative director of Dior, Jonathan Anderson, love the vintage tools. This September, some of the Garden & Wood finds were on offer at JW Anderson bearing the brand’s logo.

As they work from home, it is usually not difficult to open the shop for casual visitors, provided they telephone or email first. It’s a wonderful experience seeing what this pair of horticulturists have created in fewer than two years. The kitchen garden, which ensures that they are completely self-sufficient, only dates from this year. If you can wait until next June, there will be an added visual treat at the sawmill. What was once mown lawn behind the building was left to grow long in 2024, revealing triple-decker bee orchids, growing so close to one another that it was impossible not to tread on them. This summer, there were fewer bee orchids, but many more pyramidals and one green-winged orchid.

All these, like the vintage finds, are now in the best possible hands.