Most of us own at least one garden tool we would never part with. Maybe it was a parent’s, maybe it simply never let us down. The Thornett Trowel started out as exactly that kind of tool: a homemade scoop that sat in an English barn for more than sixty years and still worked as well as the day it was made.
What Sid Hill found in his grandmother’s barn
In 2023, ecological garden designer Sid Hill cleared out the barn of his late grandmother, Janet Elizabeth Thornett. Among the tools his grandfather had made himself in the garage, sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, was an all-steel trowel with a curved blade. No drawings, no factory, no brand. After decades of hard use it showed no rust, no bending and no loose handle.
Hill works from the soil up. He knows how fragile soil structure is and what a careless tool does to the fungal threads that connect plant roots underground. When he tried the old trowel, he noticed that its curved blade cut a clean, round planting hole straight down, without lifting, twisting or packing the soil next to it. He started using it every day.
A gold medal for what lies beneath
At the 2024 RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Hill built the Microbiome Garden, a garden about the fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms that keep soil alive, help plants grow and store carbon. He built it with his grandfather’s trowel, on purpose: a garden about disturbing the soil as little as possible deserved a tool that did just that.
The garden won a gold medal, and Hill received the Prince of Wales Trophy for Sustainable Horticulture, the RHS award for sustainable gardening. When Sneeboer heard the story, the smiths in Bovenkarspel wanted to make that trowel for every gardener.
How Sneeboer rebuilt a homemade tool
Working with Hill, Sneeboer kept the shape of the original blade and rebuilt everything else the way it builds its own tools: all stainless steel, an induction-hardened blade and a laser-welded joint between blade and handle.
Laser welding is still a special-order process at many manufacturers. At Sneeboer it is the normal way of working. It uses 60 to 70 percent less energy than conventional welding, is two to ten times faster and heats an area up to two hundred times smaller, so the steel stays straight and true. Sneeboer leaves the weld visible on purpose. You can see exactly how the trowel is put together, with no coating hiding anything.
Getting there took patience. The first prototypes were hard to make, mostly at the spot where the handle meets the blade. Sneeboer always polishes that transition smooth, because it decides how the tool sits in your hand after an hour of planting. Twenty prototypes went to Chelsea in 2025 and sold out on the first day, but Sneeboer did not want to rush production or lower the standard. It took seven rounds of adjusting and testing over several months before the weld could be made comfortably and consistently.
Why a curved blade matters for your soil
A flat or slightly cupped trowel is made to scoop and lift. That is fine for many jobs, but when you plant with it, you tend to pry, which compacts the soil around the hole, breaks up fungal threads and crushes the small, porous crumbs that hold water and air.
The Thornett Trowel works differently. You push the curved blade in, turn it once and lift out a neat cylinder of soil. The ground around the hole stays as it was, and the mycorrhizal networks that trade nutrients between roots are left alone. If you garden no-dig, or you are working to bring tired soil back to life, this is the reason to reach for it.
The trowel is about 21.5 inches (55 cm) long and weighs about 1.5 pounds (700 grams). It feels balanced rather than heavy, and it asks for a steady hand more than strength. Browse our hand-forged garden trowels to find a Sneeboer trowel for your own planting.
A name with a story behind it
Sneeboer named the tool after Janet Elizabeth Thornett, the woman whose husband made the original trowel that lasted her a lifetime.
Every Thornett Trowel comes with a fifty-year warranty on the steel. It has no coating, no composite parts and no screws or rivets that can work loose, so if anything ever does happen to it, it can be welded or sharpened instead of thrown away. It is not a limited edition either: the Thornett Trowel is a permanent part of the Sneeboer range, made for gardeners who take their soil seriously and for whoever inherits the tool after them.
Tools for life and generations to come.