Garden of Literal Meanings

The Garden of Literal Meanings is a walled garden and administrative precinct occupying the whole of Floor 2001, comprising eleven cultivated chambers, four sub-annexes, a herbarium, and the upper terminus of the Sighing Stair. It is the principal stronghold of the Literalist School and the seat of the Society for Literal Concordance. Its founding principle, restated at the gate, is that a garden is for plants, and that any other use of the word is an intrusion requiring a filing.

Layout and Cultivation

The Garden is divided by hornbeam hedges into numbered beds, each labelled with the plant it contains and nothing else. The beds run from Bed 1 (cabbage) to Bed 211 (a low, bitter herb whose label reads unnamed; the naming subcommittee has met fortnightly since 1802). The eastern flank is given over entirely to the Garden of Unwatered Blooms, where the plants are maintained according to the instruction rather than the intention. Floor 1982 holds the better-known garden of that name; the eastern chamber here is the older and receives fewer visitors, which the gardeners prefer.

The sub-annexes are reached by the Sighing Stair, which enters the Garden at the herbarium landing. The herbarium itself is kept to the left of the landing. Visitors are asked not to sigh on the herbarium side, as the specimens have been dried twice.

The Heraldic Bed and the Order of Reading

The garden's arms — a spade over a closed book — were granted in the Grant of Floor 2001 and have since been the subject of three recensions, the third of which omits the book. A dispute has accordingly arisen as to whether the arms may be read at all, or only looked at. The School of Literal Indexing maintains that an armorial bearing is a figure requiring an entry in the index, and has indexed the Garden's arms under six headings, two of which refer to the same tincture. The School of Literal Placement holds instead that an arm is placed and not described, and that indexing it is an error of category.

At the centre of the Garden stands the Bed of Unread Petitions, a raised square of gravel into which supplicants are invited to cast written requests. Nothing is planted there. The clerk Scribe Vor once noted that the Bed is the only part of the Garden that has never failed to produce what was put into it, and was asked to revise the remark. The revision, in the Annals of the Garden for the year of the second audit, reads: "The Bed returns what is placed in it, at the rate of one return per placement."

The Gallery and the Annexes

The Gallery of Literal Portraits opens off the north wall and is hung with sitters depicted exactly as described in their commissions, a practice that has cost the Gallery several sitters. Annex Omicron-3 houses the Linguistic Anomalists, who have occupied it since the Concordance of Annexes assigned them space and then, in a later recension, assigned the same space to a stationery store. The stationery store has never appeared. The Anomalists cite this as evidence of their thesis and have declined to move.

Annex Theta contains the Garden's records; Annex Eta the Garden's seeds; the two were exchanged in the winter of the year the river froze and have not been fully separated since. Scribe Vor was seconded from this Garden to Floor 1982: The Garden of Unwatered Blooms and maintains that one of the annexes still owes the other a ledger.

Governance and Jurisdiction

Conduct in the Garden is governed by Clause 22.1.δ of the Maintenance Ordinances, which forbids "the introduction into any bed of a sense not native to it." Enforcement is by the Garden's own wardens, who are empowered to uproot and confiscate. The clause has been invoked twice in living memory: once against a party of visitors who brought a metaphor in a hatbox, and once against a gardener who explained the roses.

Society for Literal Concordance holds its principal chambers here and settles conflicting citations by preferring whichever Concordance was most recently amended, a rule the Society itself describes as "practical." The Floor 2001: The Garden of Literal Meanings article records the Garden's placement as disputed between the School of Literal Indexing and the School of Literal Placement; the Garden's own position is that it is where it is, and that this has never required a school.

Points of Scholarly Disagreement

The Garden's foundation is described differently in the two Concordances that mention it. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, states that the Garden was established to grow plants and that the Literalist School settled there afterwards, "for the shade." The Seventh Concordance, Annex 1, reverses the order, holding that the School established the Garden as a demonstration and that the cabbage was added later as ballast. Neither annex cites a date, and the Garden's own foundation stone is inscribed only with the word garden.

More consequentially, the Garden is identified by the School of Literal Construction as the site where that School was established, a claim accepted in the Garden's own annals but rejected by the Bureau of Literal Reckoning, which finds no foundation record and notes that the Constructionists have never built anything there. The Bureau's finding is filed in Annex Theta, or Eta.

"The Garden is precisely what it is called, and visitors who find it otherwise have misunderstood the word called."

— Society for Literal Concordance, Notice at the Gate, rev. 9

Admission is by ticket. The gate is locked at dusk, so that the word closed may apply.