DRIVING home to Hazlemere from Rickmansworth the other morning I trundled past a man with a machine blowing leaves off the path outside his house into the road.

The temptation of course was obvious but I resisted knowing that a bus behind me would demonstrate what a futile exercise he was undertaking.

It seemed to me he would be out there all day like some latter-day green-fingered King Canute trying to hold back forever the tide of leaves being blown back onto his path (although strictly speaking it’s the council’s path) by passing traffic.

I can’t see the point of leaf blowing machines. Clearly there was some bright Herbert who dreamed up this idea to part the ever-gullible gardeners from their hard-earned cash. If anything demonstrated the futility of leaf blowers it was the gales that ripped through our area over the weekend.

When I saw – or rather heard, for they are loud and obtrusive machines – a worker using one outside Hazlemere Parish Council offices off Cedar Avenue last week I was at first mildly amused but then, the more I thought about it, quite annoyed. More on that in a moment.

Making equipment for gardeners is a multi-million pound business and while many of us are happy with the basics – a fork, trowel, spade, simple lawn mower and the like – there are thousands of others who happily fork out wads of cash for all manner of gadgets.

Take the humble bird table. A pole with a flat bit nailed to the top is all that is needed. Our feathered friends are not going to refuse your offering of seeds if the table isn’t up to the mercurial design standards of Norman Foster. All they care about is food – not what they’re eating off.

Yet I’ve seen bird tables that someone from a Glasgow tenement would give his mate’s eye-teeth to live in. They come with a thatched roof, multiple levels and mock Tudor beams. They look ridiculous.

Then there’s the lawn mower. Man’s invention clearly knows no bounds. Apart from the old blood-sweat and tears manual mowers you have the option of electric or petrol. Then there are hover mowers, roller blade mowers and rota mowers and each class has a large variety of options depending on the size of your wallet, garden and/or ego.

And the coupe de grace, so to speak, is the tractor mower. I accept some lawns may need one of these, but come on. For most people this is a status symbol in the gardening world. They are the Bentley of mowers from which you can look down on those with their Ford Fiesta hovers. I dare say there are even tractor mowers now that have an iPod option.

I thought leaf blowers deserved the title of the most pointless piece of gardening gear until I discovered the flame gun. Seriously. This is a petrol-driven device you apparently use for weeding between rows and under trees and shrubs.

Clearly forks are no longer de rigueur for such work. You now have to adapt a scorched earth policy, though what your neighbour might think when the adjoining creosote fence goes up in flames is anyone’s guess.

So back to our parish council and the delightful Cedar Barn, pictured above left. Apart from the fact that using a very loud leaf blower at 7.30 in the morning is not going to go down a storm with surrounding residents and the adjacent care home, there is the environmental issue.

In these days of well-publicised dwindling resources, we expect our various local authorities to be setting us an example and energy-guzzling leaf blowers don’t even begin to come into the equation. Also the two days of work looked pretty much a waste of time after Saturday’s storm had liberally spread leaves all over the place again.

If the council is worried about the ugly dragon that is Health & Safety raising its head, then a rake and brush will do the job – it’s all we used to have at one time. Otherwise let the leaves blow where they will – come the spring they’ll have mysteriously disappeared anyway.