Gardening: Something crafty in the woodshed: Anna Pavord admires brand-new classic designs that fill gaps in the gardener's armoury

James Barnes, head gardener of Bicton in Devon, was one of the great martinets of Victorian horticulture. A place for everything, and everything in its place. That sort of man. He won a libel case against his employer, Baroness Rolle, after she complained that, when he retired in the 1860s, he left the grounds at Bicton in a mess. He was awarded pounds 200 damages.

A look in Bicton's toolsheds would have told Baroness Rolle that she was on to a loser. Barnes describes the layout of one of them as though he were a general detailing a military formation. On the first row of pegs (the shed was 54ft long) hung the long-handled tools, grass rakes, leaf rakes, iron rakes. On the next were the 'draw hoes, tan forks, dung forks and prongs, spades and shovels of various kinds, pickaxes, mattocks and bills, dung drags, edging shears . . .' To Barnes, these were not tools but objects of worth and weight: Sheffield steel, English ash, meticulously cleaned and oiled before being returned to their spaces in the shrine.

John Piper, a furniture and product design graduate, hopes to rekindle some of this respect for tools with the new designs he developed for his degree show at Kingston University last summer. Some of his prototypes are now in production: a flower holder that looks like a quiver; a large, galvanised scoop (a bit like a short, fat coal hod); and a boat-shaped basket made of steam-bent American cherry. Still in the pipeline is a small watering pot and a side- angled rake to swish things into the scoop.

You could put any of these pieces among Barnes's monumental collection of tools and they would not stick out, not because they are consciously retrospective, but because, like all good bits of design, the shapes seem inevitable and ageless.

Agelessness has its problems, though, for a designer. Take the spade. There is only so much you can do if it is to remain essentially a spade. You can tinker with the handle, try plastic and stainless steel in place of wood and forged steel, but it will still look much like the spades in illustrations to 12th-century manuscripts. So Piper decided to look for gaps in the gardener's armoury. He went to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, watched the gardeners at work and analysed their tasks. He went to the Museum of Rural Life at Reading and wallowed in nostalgia. As a corrective, he took a course in Finland on the semantics and semiotics of design.

'All that for a flower holder]' you gasp. But what a flower holder, he reminds you. It is made in Birmingham by a small firm of tinsmiths that he took for ever to find. 'There's no database to go to when you are looking for a manufacturer who can turn out things like this. Look at the edging. See how beautifully it is finished off.' The metal is turned over like a fine hem, making it friendly, pleasant to handle.

The holder has a leather strap and a cutting knife that tucks in at the front. The mark II version will have a small pair of Piper-designed secateurs instead of the knife. Why? 'Because it looks sweeter,' he said, but at present he cannot afford the tooling-up costs of making the secateurs.

If he were a potter or a woodturner or a weaver, he could apply for Crafts Council money to help him to set up in business. Because he is a designer who wants to manufacture his own designs, he cannot. What he needs is something else the Victorians were good at providing: a patron.

He is already having to make painful compromises on his designs. The prototype scoop (he calls it a barrow) had a beech handle and a beech strip at its base. But beech was too expensive, so the new scoop has a brass handle which matches the small brass plate screwed on to it, announcing his company name, Common or Garden. He wanted to put 'Made in England' on it, but he couldn't afford that either.

He settled on these two products after his research showed that the things people most liked doing in their gardens were picking and planting out flowers. In his portfolio are photographs of all the prototypes that led up to the final design of the scoop. First you see a barrowish-looking barrow with a proper front wheel, which was dropped in favour of a shape you can use to scoop along the ground, gathering up leaves and debris, and also to carry plants around the garden. Like the flower holder, it is made from hot-rolled, spangled, galvanised sheet which fades from its initial brightness to comfortable watering- can grey. The scoop, all hand-made, is about 2ft 6in long, the flower holder 10in. 'And,' he says, 'they will last for ever.'

To see how they will look in old age, go to The Chelsea Gardener, where a firm called Marmadukes is selling garden tools more than 40 years old. You can find old tools for a tenth of the price on market stalls, but these are carefully reconditioned. The twin of my favourite fork was there, made by Corts (mine was made by Wooldridge and Sons of Stourbridge), with fine tines, only 5in wide, but with a 31in handle. For a tall person, it is perfect for working between plants in a border.

The heftiest one at The Chelsea Gardener is a Griffin Brand fork. After a morning's work with this, your arms would be stretching to your knees. The metal haft runs all the way up the handle, ending in a vast, D-shaped grip that even Desperate Dan would have trouble getting his fist round. It costs pounds 44.95.

Griffin is said to be one of the best of the old makes, along with Brades, Skelton, Spear and Jackson Neverbend and Elwell. As well as forks, Marmadukes has old spades, rakes, cultivators, swan-neck hoes, watering cans and solid old secateurs.

John Piper's tools available by mail- order from 53a George Row, Adlards Wharf, London SE16 4UH (071-252 0505): hand barrow pounds 59 (plus pounds 3.50 p&p), flower holder pounds 32 ( pounds 2 p&p), boat- shaped basket pounds 26 ( pounds 2 p&p). The Chelsea Gardener, 125 Sydney Street, London SW3 6NR (071-352 5656); Mon-Sat (10am-6pm), Sun (10am-5pm).

(Photograph omitted)