Sundials

Ideas for choosing the best sundials for your unique style
Sundials for gardens come in a variety of finishes and added details. As a technology that has been used for centuries, many have an antiqued or aged finish for stylistic reasons. If your home is Victorian or traditional in style, look for unique sundials placed on pillars, antiqued metals, and designs that feature Old World motifs. For a more transitional style, look for a little whimsy added to the design of a metal sundial. This might include animals, meaningful quotes, or unique scenes inlaid into the surface or incorporated into the design of the shadow caster.

Ancient ingenuity: how sundials work
Antique sundials use either a light spot or cast a shadow to determine the local solar time of any specific location. With the onset of technology, sundials have been used less and less for telling time and are now more for decorative purposes. Sun dials use a longitudinal and latitudinal location relative to the earth turning on its polar axis in relation to the sun to tell the time at that particular spot. Garden sundials do have the ability to tell the time, but the accuracy is difficult to pinpoint, making them more decorative in nature.

A (very) brief history of sundials
Outdoor sundials were first used in Ancient Greece, and are found in archaeological digs around the world. They were used in cultures all over the globe and have become more sophisticated as cultures advanced. Prior to the invention of the clock, sundials were the only source of time measurement for centuries. Wall sundials were often displayed on municipal buildings up until the introduction of the railroad in America. Armillary sundials represent the terrestrial globe and the celestial sky and were created as early as the 4th Century in China and Greece. Since sundials were a useful technology, they lasted centuries until a better technology (the clock) replaced them.