As an aside, I have a feeling that the word "garden" has something to do with "guard house", in the days of castles and fortified houses. It would, perhaps,have been the area between the inner and outer defended walls of a dwelling? You would have to go back further than Old Norse to find a connection; the OED suggests that the words up to that point had different meaning. Garden=enclosure; guard=custody. "Ward" comes into this somehow; there's a relationship there, probably. It seems to me that books like The New English Garden make attempts to define the word "garden" completely pointless. Bob Nold, Denver, Colorado, USA