Songfacts®:

• This eerily dreamlike track is a rumination on past memories, hopes and desires that manifest themselves as nightmares.
  
  Everything's growing in our garden
  You don't have to know that it's haunted
  
  Bridgers told Apple Music: "This song is about growing up and falling in love and murder and a sex dream and witches and zombies and anxiety and depression and energy work and therapy and wanting to garden."
• Bridgers wrote the song on tour using an iPad app to create most of the sounds. The deep voice you hear is that of Jeroen Vrijhoef, Bridger's 6'7" tour manager.
• The track's opening verse alludes to Bridgers murdering a skinhead and burying him in the garden. The inspiration for the lyric came from an old crush of the singer who lived next door to a Nazi and used to joke about killing the dude and burying him in the garden.
• During the chorus, Bridgers references the traditional Chinese medical belief that liver health is tied to emotional health.
  
  The doctor put her hands over my liver
  She told me my resentment's getting smaller
  
  Bridgers told American Songwriter was based on actual visit to a nutritionist lady in Los Angeles. "She told me that and I thought that it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. So, I had to write it into a song," the singer explained.
  
  Bridgers added that a lot of her lyrics are actual events that she stored in her brain. Then when she picks up a guitar and comes up a lyric, she says to herself, "Wow, that happened."
• Bridgers released "Garden Song" on February 26, 2020, as the lead single from her second studio album, Punisher. In a press release, the singer used the words "crying" and the feeling of numbness to describe its contents. She explained to Stereogum the record's theme is about how though she has been blessed with everything she wants - a successful career as a musician and supportive friends - she's not happy. This is because the tools she used to deal with past traumas are holding her back from the things she enjoys.
  
  "That's what this record feels like, someone who started to go to therapy and work out some of the things you can't change about yourself no matter your circumstances," Bridgers concluded. "You just have to do it."
• Directed by Bridgers' younger brother, Jackson, the idea behind the video came from the singer herself. After smoking a bong, she asked her brother to then "surprise" her with what happened next. It becomes increasingly bizarre, as Bridgers hangs out with some fuzzy creatures before comedian and author Tig Notaro appears dressed as a monk.