A Well Defined Garden

I'm not impressed with my old Chambers dictionary! It defines a garden as follows:

a piece of ground on which flowers, etc., are cultivated; a pleasant spot.

This seems rather dismissive of all the lovely green things one usually associates with a garden. The words 'flowers etc.' don't begin to do justice to even the smallest garden.

A Pleasant Spot?

And what about this throw-away phrase, 'a pleasant spot'? Singular? I should jolly well think there are many pleasant spots in my own garden, after all the time I spend weeding, planting, digging, raking, planning, designing, shifting, worrying, watering, staking, checking for aphids... This definition obviously needs some improvement.

Cambridge

Cambridge should know about gardens, being a part of the English Garden culture. So I looked up the online Cambridge dictionary, with slightly better results:'A piece of land next to and belonging to a house, where flowers and other plants are grown, and often containing an area of grass.'

Oxford

Oxford online (granted, it's the compact version) agrees that a house, a lawn, and flowers are necessary to have a garden:'A piece of ground adjoining a house, typically cultivated to provide a lawn and flowerbeds.'

My old, fat, red Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary (published in 1977) just doesn't cut the mustard, though it claims it has 'always faithfully reflected changes in a living language'. So I checked in the Twenty-First Century on-line version to see if the concept of a garden definition had improved. Partial success!

Chambers 2001

The 'piece of ground' has been transformed into an 'area of land' - a phrase with a much more expansive, evocative feeling. I'm afraid flowers specifically have been given the push in favour of a broader collection of possible garden components - this is not necessarily a bad thing:

'An area of land, usually one adjoining a house, where grass, trees, ornamental plants, fruit, vegetables, etc, are grown.'

Yippee! Now we're getting somewhere! The Moosey garden fits!