a garden: a watered, planted plot of ground that people tend and eat from
The picture behind this word is a bounded piece of ground that someone has planted and, above all, watered. Water is what makes it a garden, which is why Isaiah's worst curse image is a garden with no water and why the picture of blessing is gardens lining a river. Nothing about it is decorative. A garden here is worked ground that is expected to produce.
Most of its appearances are that plain. Exiles in Babylon are told to plant gardens and eat what grows in them; the restored people will make gardens and eat their fruit; blight and locusts strip the gardens of a people who will not turn back; the king in Ecclesiastes makes himself gardens and parks (פַּרְדֵּס) and plants fruit trees of every kind in them.
One group of uses is different in tone. Isaiah attacks worship carried on at gardens, where people sacrificed, burned incense, and put themselves through purifying rites away from the temple. Exactly what went on at those places is argued over, and the word itself says nothing about it: it simply names the site. The more common garden word (גַּן) is never used that way, and it is the word for the garden in Eden and for Jerusalem's royal garden, neither of which this word ever names.
Because a garden lives or dies by its water, it also serves as an image. Israel's tents spread out like gardens beside a river, and God's setting things right springs up as surely as a garden makes its sown seed sprout.
Nuances
What kind of worship went on at the gardens Isaiah condemns in Isaiah 1:29, 65:3 and 66:17.
- contestedSyncretistic fertility or mourning rites of an Adonis or Tammuz type, with the quickly withering potted greens of the classical gardens of Adonis matching the withered garden of Isaiah 1:30.; Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 1-12, Continental Commentary (Fortress, 1991); Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39, Anchor Bible 19 (Doubleday, 2000); Karen Randolph Joines, Serpent Symbolism in the Old Testament (Haddonfield House, 1974)
- contestedSacrifices at private shrines outside the temple, possibly with associations with the dead, since the classical Adonis rites are attested only centuries later and should not be read back into Judah of the eighth to sixth centuries BCE.; Brevard S. Childs, Isaiah, OTL (Westminster John Knox, 2001); J. J. M. Roberts, First Isaiah, Hermeneia (Fortress, 2015)