Sneeboer tool set Piet Oudolf

Anyone who has ever been to the Dutch village of Hummelo, who knows the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein or the Berne Park in Bottrop will certainly be familiar with the name Piet Oudolf. Born in Haarlem, he is considered one of the most famous garden designers in Europe. Gardens designed by Oudolf stand for a style close to nature. He preferred to use grasses as a design element and is therefore still regarded today as the inventor of a certain type of garden. Just as the name Karl Förster is associated with perennial gardening, Piet Oudolf's name stands for the grass and prairie garden. His favorite tools, or at least the gardening tools he says he uses most, are the hand weeder and the planting trowel. The hand weeder has a narrow, precise blade whose sharpened edges both break up and loosen the soil. The generously dimensioned blade of the planting trowel is also supplied with sharpened edges. We offer both parts here in a tool set that Piet Oudolf has developed in collaboration with our trusted toolsmith Sneeboer in North Holland. The functional parts are hand-forged from stainless steel in the tried-and-tested manner, while the handles are made to measure from the "resonating" ash wood that we prefer for tool handles. The handles are specially engraved.

For more than 100 years, the family of the West Frisian blacksmith Jaap Sneeboer has been supplying their Dutch fellow citizens, known to be incessantly engaged in farming, dyking and horticulture, with the tools they need to do so. At Sneeboer, they use two different types of stainless steel for their traditional Frisian horticultural tools: a tougher one (with higher degrees of alloying) for the springs and grommets holding the handle and low-alloy steel that responds better to forging for the functional parts in the narrow sense. They weld the individual construction elements together, then ground and polish them by hand.

It has long become common practice to stamp and roll garden tools. However, we hardly need to describe the difference; we want to point out that forging is the only way to deal with a tool in all its details and strengthen the material in those parts where this is necessary for functional reasons.