One of the most fundamental aspects of gardening is to be prepared (although not to feel that you simply must have all of the "right" tools available before you start). The essentials for any would be gardener also depend upon the type of garden that you have to work with. For example, is your garden large, small, flat, sloped, paved or even maybe non-existant? Are you actually relegated to the balcony / your terrace courtyard, or even wholly indoors?
Whatever the case for you, there are certain tools that all gardeners will benefit from owning. The most important of which may well be, a good pair of gardening gloves. These must be supple enough to allow you to carry out your gardening chores, yet strong enough to protect your hands when working with thorny or thistly plants, stones & shale. Your gardening gloves need to fit snugly onto your hands for optimum benefit, else how will you ever manage that finer work with them?
Another staple tool whatever type of gardening you will be undertaking, from house plants to container gardening or bedding plants, is a potting trowel & hand fork set.These are useful for any kind of re-potting or small planting work, allowing you to separate the soil & dig a shallow hole or trench for those seeds, flowers, herbs & small shrubs that will give you so much pleasure inside or out. These tools are hand-sized,easy-wielding & yet strong enough to provide the leverage you need for this type of work & even for light weeding - always a favourite chore!
Of course for outside work on a larger scale a spade & a garden fork are pretty essential, they make tree planting& border creation much simpler (although it will still make those muscles ache in places you had forgotten). Lastly in your basic garden tool kit you will probably need Pruners & Garden Shears, although many a gardener will manage light pruning with an old kitchen knife or strong scissors & of course these can be added once your initial gardening begins to pay off as they aren't required until you have some plants to use them on..
With these basics, you can probably manage most of your gardening, whether you favour a formal garden landscape or the more natural look. As you can see, for this amount of tools, a garden shed is not an essential when starting out (unless you favour lawn & need something to mow it with I guess), although you will need a dedicated space to keep these tools safe & readily available for you to use whenever you have a spare moment.
Information on different types of Garden