GARDEN is an explortation of how to use visual languages in a practical way. We realized that visual languages usually only cover a limited part of programming (e.g. only control flow or only data flow), and that to do real programming we would have to let the programmer work with multiple such languages. To accomplish this we developed what we called a conceptual programming environment, GARDEN, that let the programmer develop new visual or textual languages (with appropriate visual syntax and appropriate semantics), and nest and otherwise intermix these languages in a full system. The system provided appropriate graphical and textual editors, a Lisp-like base language, a full shared object store (to let multiple programmers work on the same program at once and to support distributed applications), Smalltalk-like browsers, multiple threads, and even a compiler. The system was used to develop a wide variety of visual languages.