The British-English adjectival phrase common-or-garden is used attributively to designate:
– (literally) a plant of the most familiar or frequently occurring kind, especially one that is cultivated;
– (figuratively) something ordinary or usual for its type.
This phrase occurs, for example, in the following dialogue from the sixth episode of the seventh season of the television series Death in Paradise, first broadcast on BBC One on Thursday 8th February 2018—DI Jack Mooney was interpreted by the Irish actor Ardal O’Hanlon (born 1965):
[suspect]: I don’t know how, but he sussed that I was on to something, yeah.
[DI Jack Mooney]: Like ourselves, he “sussed” that you weren’t the common-or-garden maths teacher you claimed to be?
[suspect]: He worked out that I was writing an exposé.
The phrase common-or-garden is first recorded in A Nievve Herball, or Historie of Plantes: wherin is contayned the vvhole discourse and perfect description of all sortes of Herbes and Plantes (London: Gerard Dewes, 1578), by the English botanist Henry Lyte (1529?-1607):
[page 263]:
Of Harmall / or wilde Rue. Chap. lxxxiiij.
The Description.
THis herbe hath three or foure stemmes growing vpright, and in them are small long narrow leaues, more tenderer, and diuided into smaller or narrower leaues than the common or garden Rue.
[…]
[page 636]:
Of Garlike. Chap. lxxi.
The Kyndes.
THere be three sortes of Garlike, that is the common or garden Garlike, wilde Garlike, and Ramsons.
The earliest figurative uses of the phrase common-or-garden that I have found are as follows, in chronological order:
1-: From the West Sussex Journal. Horsham, Petworth, Midhurst and Steyning Express (Horsham, Sussex, England) of Tuesday 6th November 1866 [page 2, column 5]:
SHOREHAM.
[…]
Extraordinary Duck.—We have been favoured by our townsman Mr. Comber, with the following facts, which, if we were not well acquainted with the gentleman, we should look on the tale with very grave suspicion. Our informant told us that in October, 1864, he purchased a duck, with the intention of having it for his dinner the following day. The next morning, when he proceeded to the coop in which she was placed, for the purpose of killing her, he found an egg, which made him hesitate; the consequence was Mrs. Duck was not destroyed. The following day there was another, and so she continued for weeks and months, scarcely a day intervening without her laying, until, at the expiration of twelve months, she laid the incredible number of 266 eggs. In 1865 she laid 219, and up to the 29th October, 1866, she has laid 183, making a total of 668, or an average of 222—2 per annum. As it may be of some little interest to our readers to know in what way she has been fed, we will inform them. The principal portion of her food has been the common or garden snails, which her owner has always given her. Surely, after this, some of our gardeners will see the advantage of keeping a few ducks, especially as they can do so without expense.
2-: From The Wynaad Gold Fields, published in The Times of India (Bombay, Maharashtra, India) of Friday 23rd July 1880 [Vol. 43, No. 174, page 2, column 6]:
To reach that place forty miles of extraordinarily bad roads have still to be traversed, while the means of transit locally obtainable leave much to be desired. In fact the only vehicle which the country supplies is the bucolic bile cart of the “common or garden species,” as an entomological friend would describe it, stretched on the rough timbering of which the traveller can experience an exquisitely realistic illustration of the torments suffered by some distant progenitor upon the mediæval rack with the added disadvantage that his haggard eye will not be compensated by a single glimpse of the smiling landscape past which his clumsy instrument of torture is slowly dragged.
3-: From Ravings of a Cyclomaniac. No. III., by ‘Galley-bell’, published in the London Bicycle Club Gazette. An Official Record of the Runs, Races, and other Doings of the L.B.C. (London: Darling and Son) of Friday 29th April 1881 [Vol. 4, No. 7, page 61, column 2]:
RIDING GLOVES.
Of these there are many varieties, and in my time I’ve tried as many as I’ve come across, from the common or garden glove to those of the driver of coaches.
4-: From an article about witchcraft in India, published in The Daily Telegraph (London, England) of Saturday 30th April 1881 [No. 8,086, page 5, column 1]:
A foreign demon of exceptional malignity had overpowered the ordinary one—“the common or garden” demon, so to speak—which had hitherto troubled the sufferer.
5-: From Under the Sun (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1882), by the British naturalist, journalist and author Philip Stewart Robinson (1847-1902) [page 220]:
The proper food of the cat, the common or garden cat, is the sparrow (Spar. Britannicus).
6-: From Three in Norway. By Two of Them (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1882), by James Arthur Lees and Walter J. Clutterbuck [page 212]:
We have heard so much of this fly [i.e., the Gjende fly] that we had been expecting something rather gorgeous, a monster dragon-fly, or at least a second-rate butterfly, or a decent imitation of a stag-beetle; and we have been looking up gaudy Scotch and Canadian salmon flies, which we hoped might be passable substitutes; but, alas for the vain hopes of foolish man! the Gjende fly has come, and he is only a wretched little black beast like a very small, unenterprising, common or garden house-fly of Great Britain.
7-: From Chums: A Tale of the Queen’s Navy (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1882) [Vol. 2, page 74]:
He kept along on the right side of the road, and entered St. Martin’s Lane. Here was life and plenty of it, and he soon had to take to the road and wind his way carefully through the crowd of Sunday street hawkers, who were ready, nay anxious, to supply him or “any other gent,” with a bird of any colour or a dog of any breed, at the shortest notice.
The bells of old St. Martin’s were never noticed; the dry tones of the learned vicar, the eager pleadings of the most eloquent of curates were never heard by them; but they could paint the common, or garden, or house sparrow, canary colour; or pick you up as “purty a leetle fox-tarrier dorg” as you’d wish to see.
8-: From Amateur Attempts, published in the Uppingham School Magazine (Northampton: Stanton & Son) of March 1882 [Vol. 20, No. 152, page 58]:
Sorely did we suffer through our inexperience. We painted half a scene—grand effect, but oh! the smell of it. Mr. Editor, never try painting with common or garden oils.
9-: From The Globe and Traveller (London, England) of Wednesday 29th March 1882 [No. 27,099, page 1, column 5]:
GARDENERS.
Gardeners are of two kinds. There is the regular or domesticated gardener, perennial among the vegetables; and the “common or garden” species, hired, like Mr Healy’s valuators under the Land Act, “by the job.” These latter may be called the “hibernating” variety; and the same fine early spring which tempted so many unwary blue-bottles to court the sunshine of premature publicity has brought out swarms of hibernating gardeners.
10-: From “That Bit of Orange Peel”, published in The Durham County Advertiser (Durham, County Durham, England) of Friday 31st March 1882 [No. 3,702, page 8, column 5]—reprinted from an “American Paper”:
He was strolling leisurely up the road to the railway depot to catch the 4·30 train […]. Suddenly his eye lit on a piece of orange peel lying on the sidewalk in front of him. He fell an instant victim to the insane impulse, which the sight of such an object invariably awakens in the mind of the average youth […]. Down came his avenging patent-leather-clad foot with energy enough to crack the flagstones, and away he shot full length on his back, his heel gliding over the pavement in a manner which displayed to the admiring bystanders the invaluable lubricative qualities of the common or garden orange rind.
word histories 