The Garden - what's it about?

[Orange Monkey]

What is “The Garden” about? I have seen a few different ideas put forward. It could just be two male lovers in a garden, which would cause “trouble” in certain times and places. It could be a scene from the Garden of Gethsemane. These explanations fit the song but they leave some dangling threads that annoy me. What is the songbird doing there? Why the obsession with its wings? Are we missing something? It feels like one of those murder mysteries where everything seems sewn up at the beginning, but if you just pull on that loose thread …

The thing that renewed my interest was this passage from James’s excellent book:

“In case fans should get excited none of these notes are especially informative, though they do show that ‘The Garden’ didn’t emerge fully-formed from the maestra’s mind but required some revision along the way: Harvey refers to ‘lots of flapping noise – (his ‘escape’, his thoughts of freed[om)]’ which, probably all to the good, didn’t make it through Rob Ellis’s arrangement.”

It seems that Polly is also slightly obsessed with those wings. But why?

The obvious reading of the lyrics is that the garden contains two people and a songbird. And birds have wings, so they belong to the songbird. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The song is ambiguous. What if the wings don’t belong to the bird? Or what if the songbird is just another name for one of the people? Now one or both of the people have wings.

So, in this reading we have winged people in a garden. But not in “A Garden” rather in “The Garden” which to me suggests the original garden: the Garden of Eden. And I assume you can work out what winged people are. In his book, James even points out Polly’s allusions to the Garden of Eden in other works and on the album cover. It’s all hiding in plain sight.

Which angels are they? I don’t know. Is this the fall of Lucifer? Are we looking at Aziraphale and Crowley (Good Omens was published in 1990)? Whatever, there is Trouble taking place, and now it has a capital “T”.


Ambiguity is necessary.

So, if I’m right and this is a possible explanation of the song (I’m not claiming it’s the only one) why did Polly hide it so well that no one spotted it for so long?

I think the song has to have ambiguity and multiple meanings to work well. If it was explicitly about angels it would close off all the other interpretations and make it less accessible to people. She wants to create an atmosphere and a mood, not tell just one story.

So, she hints at angels by mentioning wings. And she hints at which garden it might be. But it has to be ambiguous, so there has to be an idea of something else present that the wings could belong to, hence the songbird has to me mentioned. And I think she made it too well hidden and hence the idea of adding flapping noises to draw attention back to the wings. But it’s a difficult balance. I think the fact that there are 3 different lyrics for the song also reflects the struggle to get the balance right (looking AT his wings / looking FOR his wings / THOUGHT HE HEARD his wings), and even the final printed lyrics don’t match what she sings on the album.

I also want to mention that when I first heard the song I thought the lyric “there was trouble taking place” was so vague as to be a bit naff. But now I think it has to be so broad and ambiguous, so it can cover anything from two naughty lovers to some fundamental sin.


And finally, on the IITOYD tour, do you recall that when Polly performed The Garden, they used a spotlight in front of her while she was waving her arm like a wing to project a massive winged shadow figure on the back wall? Maybe she thought we needed another hint :-)


In summary, I’m not claiming to have found one true meaning for this song, but I like the way that I can explain the songbird and the wings at last. It seems quite satisfying to me.