garden-variety (also common or garden)
adjective

- very common or ordinary

- common, usual, or ordinary; unexceptional

- of the usual or ordinary type; commonplace

Cambridge Dictionary / Dictionary(dot)com / Oxford Languages

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PHRASE ORIGIN

The seemingly ordinary phrase "common or garden" has a surprisingly green-thumbed origin. It began in England as a descriptor for plants that thrived not just in cultivated gardens but also on public commons – shared land where everyone could forage. This abundance naturally led to the association of "common or garden" with things unexceptional or ordinary.

The phrase soon blossomed beyond botany, morphing into an adjective. By the late 19th century, it was being used to describe anything ordinary or commonplace.

Meanwhile, in America, a similar term sprouted: "garden-variety". Carrying the same meaning of ordinary or commonplace, it gained popularity around the 1920s. Just like "common or garden”, it evokes things readily found in your own backyard, signifying something commonplace.

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IDIOMS ABOUT ORDINARY

- beige on beige (extremely bland/dull) = “The home decor was just beige on beige, very boring."

- dime a dozen (extremely common/ordinary) = “Influencers like that are a dime a dozen these days."

- dishwater dull (extremely boring/dull) = “The conversation was just dishwater dull."

- Joe Sixpack (average working class person) = “A Joe Sixpack wouldn’t go for such a fancy product.”

- meat and potatoes (basic, plain) = “This restaurant has a basic meat and potatoes menu at a reasonable price.”

- off the rack (standard, nothing special) = “The store offers an off the rack selection, nothing unique."

- vanilla existence (plain, unremarkable life) = "They seemed to live a totally vanilla existence in the suburbs, however...”

- whitebread mentality (being extremely bourgeois/conventional) = “A whitebread mentality is strongly associated with low-risk behaviour.”

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SYNONYMS

a dime a dozen, beige, bog-standard, common as dirt/muck, dull as dishwater, fair-to-middling, GARDEN-VARIETY, ho-hum, humdrum, Joe Sixpack, John Doe, just so, meat and potatoes, middle-of-the-road, middlebrow, middling, off the rack, par for the course, pedestrian, plain jane, plain-vanilla, prosaic, quotidian, run-of-the-mill, so-so, vanilla, whitebread, workaday

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SMUGGLE OWAD into an English conversation, say something like:

“Life would be quite overwhelming without a baseline of GARDEN-VARIETY products and experiences.”

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