The answer is USUAL, five letters. Garden variety means ordinary, the kind of thing you could find anywhere, and USUAL is the five-square word for that sense, with NORMAL and COMMON covering six. A question mark changes that: Garden variety? turns literal and wants a kind of garden, such as HERB or ZEN.
The idiom grew out of plant names
Garden variety in the figurative sense of ordinary is first recorded in 1928. The image is horticultural: the variety any garden might grow, as opposed to a rare or exotic specimen. The phrase now applies to anything unremarkable, so a garden-variety cold is just a cold and a garden-variety thief is nobody special. The garden lent English another idiom in the same decade: to lead someone up the garden path, meaning to entice or deceive them, is attested by 1925.
British English says the same thing a different way. Common or garden, used chiefly in Britain and Ireland, is an extension of the practice of naming domestic, and therefore non-exotic, plants as common or garden. Both phrases rest on one idea: if it grows in everybody’s yard, there is nothing special about it.
Five squares or six decides USUAL or NORMAL
The straight synonyms split cleanly by length. USUAL takes five squares, NORMAL and COMMON take six, and AVERAGE takes seven. SOSO, the grid form of so-so with the hyphen dropped, takes four and suits a clue that sounds like faint praise.
The six-letter pair is the one that needs care. NORMAL and COMMON share an O in the second square and an M in the fourth, so a crossing in either of those positions tells you nothing. A letter in the first, third, fifth or sixth square separates them at once, and it is worth getting one before you write either word in.
Garden variety fills by length
The question mark matters as much as the count, so the table marks the punning answers.
| Letters | Answer | What points to it |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | ZEN | A question mark, a kind of garden |
| 4 | HERB | A question mark, a kind of garden or plant |
| 4 | SOSO | Faint praise |
| 5 | USUAL | The default |
| 5 | PLAIN | Unadorned |
| 5 | BASIC | No extras |
| 6 | NORMAL | Standard, typical |
| 6 | COMMON | Found everywhere |
| 6 | ANNUAL | A literal garden plant |
| 7 | AVERAGE | Middle of the pack |
A question mark turns the garden literal
Add a question mark and garden variety stops meaning ordinary and starts meaning a variety of garden. Garden variety? has produced HERB in the New York Times, while the Los Angeles Times has used the same wording for ZEN. An herb garden and a Zen garden are both kinds of garden, so the answer is a type rather than an adjective.
The Zen garden is worth picturing because it is so specific. The Japanese dry garden, or karesansui, arranges rocks, moss and pruned trees and bushes around gravel or sand raked to represent ripples in water. In Zen gardens the raked surface can also stand, like the white space in Japanese painting, for emptiness and distance. ANNUAL comes at the phrase from the plant side instead: an annual germinates, flowers and dies in a single growing season, a variety of garden plant rather than a kind of garden.
Why the hyphen comes and goes
In published clue lists, the adjective sense usually appears hyphenated, as Garden-variety, the way it would be written in front of a noun in a garden-variety cold. The punning versions tend to drop the hyphen and add the question mark, because they treat garden variety as a noun phrase, a variety of garden. That split follows the ordinary rule for compound modifiers: hyphenated in front of a noun, open when the phrase stands on its own, as in a cold of the garden variety. Grids ignore hyphens entirely, so the punctuation in the clue is one of the few signals you get about which reading is live.
So read the punctuation before the meaning. A hyphen and no question mark points to the straight synonyms, USUAL, NORMAL, COMMON and the rest, depending on the count. A question mark means it is time to think about gardens.
Frequently asked questions
What does garden variety mean?
It means ordinary or unremarkable, the kind of thing you could find anywhere. The figurative sense is first recorded in 1928 and borrows its image from plants, the varieties any garden might grow. British English expresses the same idea with the phrase common or garden.
What is a six-letter answer for garden variety?
NORMAL and COMMON both take six squares. They share an O in the second square and an M in the fourth, so you need a crossing somewhere else to choose between them. ANNUAL also takes six, but only when the clue is punning on garden plants.
Why does Garden variety? give HERB or ZEN?
The question mark tells you to read the phrase literally, as a variety of garden. An herb garden and a Zen garden are both kinds of garden, so HERB and ZEN fit. The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have each used that wording for those answers.
