Abstract: The academics at home and abroad have long been focusing on the historical and feminist perspectives in the study of Byatt’s cultural ideas, while overlooking the writer’s great concern over the “other” (the other people, society, nation, and nature), and in particular, showing little interest in the recurrent garden image in Byatt’s work. This image, in effect, not only bears English historical imagination and cultural identity, but integrates the writer’s cultural reflection on society, art, nature and science. This article therefore aims to explore the cultural connotation of the garden image in Byatt’s novella “Morpho Eugenia.” In her critique of the garden duet between the “ideal English garden” and the “triste tropical jungles”, Byatt composes a piece of “Garden Fugue” on Englishness in two contrapuntal voices of “ideal” and “triste”, thus constructing an inquiry and a reflection of life values and cultural ideas and revealing the impact of the negative aesthetic experience upon individual metamorphosis and national rejuvenation.

Key words: "Garden" Fugue, A. S. Byatt, "Morpho Eugenia", cultural reflection