Burgon & Ball has for many years been known for its innovation, creating award-winning tools to make gardening easier and more pleasurable. In a particularly strong year for tool innovation on the Burgon & Ball stand (8E50-F51), around half the 30+ new products on show are tools; there are both ingenious individual tools and whole new collections, specially created for the way people garden today.

The Sheffield-based manufacturer is able to develop new tools that consistently hit the mark, thanks to its approach of tuning into market trends. Gardens are evolving – and so are gardeners. By looking at how people garden, and the themes of current garden design, Burgon & Ball is able to create tools and ranges to meet market needs as they emerge.

A perfect example is the new RHS-endorsed container gardening range. Today’s smaller homes and busy lifestyles mean there’s often not the time or space for a large garden, and containers offer an easy and hugely popular way to bring a burst of instant colour to any space. Larger gardens also make the most of container gardening’s flexibility, simplicity and style; the trend really is universal. Burgon & Ball’s new specialist container tools are the perfect way to plant, weed and maintain container displays quickly and easily.

A further trend is to blur the lines between indoors and outdoors; homeowners want to use their garden as an additional space for entertaining. Aggregates are increasingly being used to create a low-maintenance, attractive surface – and the new Super Slice has been designed to be highly efficient at weeding in these contemporary finishes. Super Slice also extends the effectiveness of the best-selling Weed Slice, tackling new areas of the garden where larger areas need weeding, such as veg beds or even allotments.

And with time at a premium for today’s gardener, tools to make gardening easier and faster have huge appeal. The new Express Hoe has a pivoting dual-edged blade, which moves to find the perfect angle to bite into the soil on both the push and the pull stroke, slicing through weeding in half the time. The fine blade moves effortlessly through all kinds of soil, letting the gardener save their energies for more appealing garden tasks.

With a wide selection of innovative new tools designed to meet the needs of the changing face of today’s gardens – and the way people garden today – the Burgon & Ball stand at Glee (8E50-F51) is simply a must-see.