Comments on: Garden Leave

By: Vanna Tooles

Vanna Tooles — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 03:30:31 +0000

I really love to grow vegetables on small gardens because it is easy to maintain. .

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By: Ian Reid

Ian Reid — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 17:12:49 +0000

My dad went to a Public school in Scotland. It was just that. It’s the English that misuse the terminology, not the Scots. In England it is quite usual to confuse “Britain” and “England”. Not so in Scotland. THe same alllies to Wales and Northern Ireland.Please try to avoid the confusion in the US of A.

By: Steve Dunham

Steve Dunham — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:36:51 +0000

I’m glad you quoted the phrase “common or garden” (which I would not have recalled otherwise). I’ve seen it, sometimes hyphenated, in British writing.

By: Stephen Burke

Stephen Burke — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 11:41:54 +0000

Speaking as another Brit, I also think there’s some linguistic and/or cultural confusion here. A garden is indeed any fairly small area where flowers, shrubs, trees, vegetables etc are cultivated, which may be attached to a house or be in a public area. I have no real idea what “yard” means to an American – to me a yard would be paved (c.f. courtyard) or at most grassed and also enclosed, and hence not the same thing at all (front gardens are often not enclosed). In the UK most people are obsessed with gardens (I speak as someone who isn’t!) and hence essentially all houses have them, although in my case “jungle” might be a more suitable word …

As for the phrase itself, I don’t think it’s simply a euphemism – someone forced to take an extended period of leave may well spend a lot of the time gardening because it’s something which can absorb a large amount of time without any particular need to finish what you started, unlike say redecorating a room. For many Brits gardening is the default activity when they have nothing else to do – perhaps Americans are different?

By: Sylvia Joyce

Sylvia Joyce — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 15:43:19 +0000

“… “garden.” Brits use it to mean “yard,” especially the back yard of a row house.”

Speaking as a Brit, I feel that your qualifying phrase here is misleading. We use “garden” to refer to any cultivated space around a dwelling, whether at the front, at the back, or to the side(s). In fact, many “row houses” here, especially older ones, lack a cultivated space at the rear, having instead a paved area which we Brits refer to as a “yard”.

(The Americans and the English: two peoples divided by a common language! :))