The idea of the city-state of Singapore as a 'garden city' has been essential to Singaporean discourses of national construction, which centre on the use of this term by the Prime Minister in the early stages of independence in the 1960s and 1970s. For Singapore, the garden city meant a clean, organised and manicured urban landscape, which was executed by public cleaning programmes and garden design. In this essay I situate Singapore's garden city within a longer tradition that looks back to the English garden city movement, via the works of British colonial administrators in Malaya. I argue that the regional desire to implement a garden city plan was not limited to Singapore, but was desired by many Malaysian cities as a route to economic advancement, and as such, this urban design concept became an element of public rhetoric that could be adapted to promote any desirable development in the urban sphere. In republican Singapore, this meant physical developments through urban and industrial growth, but it also meant transformations within the population, through efforts to enforce public ideas of hard work, consideration, and a sense of obligation to the city environment. The garden city, I argue, was tangled up with both internal and external perceptions of Singapore, and therefore became a complex political instrument of nation building and promoting modern lifestyle.