The Garden of Eden is the place where Adam and Eve were set after their creation and lived in God’s presence before the Fall. There they faced the choice between partaking of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and remaining in their state of innocence. Lehi teaches that the garden’s two trees were placed there in explicit opposition to one another — “the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter” — and that this pairing was necessary to bring about God’s eternal purposes and to make genuine human agency possible (2 Nephi 2:15). Had Adam not transgressed, he would have remained in the garden, all things staying in the state in which they were created, and he and Eve would have had no children, having no joy because they knew no misery and doing no good because they knew no sin (2 Nephi 2:22-23).
After Adam and Eve partook of the forbidden fruit they were driven out of the garden to till the earth and to bring forth children (2 Nephi 2:19-20). Their expulsion lengthened the days of their posterity into a state of probation in which all must repent (2 Nephi 2:21). The account treats the Fall as part of God’s plan: “Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy” (2 Nephi 2:25).
To keep Adam and Eve from returning to eat of the tree of life and live forever, God placed cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way at the east of the garden (Alma 12:21; Alma 42:2-3). The garden also appears in a prophecy of future restoration: the Lord “will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord” (2 Nephi 8:3).