Garden Leave
So, why “gardening” leave? No one actually believes the person is taking time off to garden, any more than American politicians quit to “spend more time with their families.” I think the term is probably a slightly sarcastic reference to the well-known British affection for maintaining a small garden, coupled with the sense of a garden being a place you can park someone (a child, perhaps) where they can putter around and while away the time without getting into trouble.
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Sylvia Joyce:
March 3rd, 2012 at 10:43 am
“… “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! :))
Stephen Burke:
March 6th, 2012 at 6:41 am
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?
Steve Dunham:
April 6th, 2012 at 1:36 pm
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.
Ian Reid:
July 26th, 2012 at 1:12 pm
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.
Vanna Tooles:
November 21st, 2012 at 10:30 pm
I really love to grow vegetables on small gardens because it is easy to maintain. .
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Steve Clark:
July 31st, 2015 at 8:31 am
Hmmmm…. in the U.K. public schools are so called because they are open to anyone who wishes to pay for them – as opposed to religious schools which are only open to those from that religion e.g. Church of England or Catholic schools. In addition, in the U.K. there are state funded schools, which technically are public schools for which no fee is required. It’s very simple really ;)