[quote=“yuli”][quote=“Charlie Jack”][quote=“monkey”][quote=“IYouThem”]
c) I was thrown into a swimming pool.
In c) it’s an adjective.
[/quote]
You are joking, right?[/quote]
That is bizarre. 
The expression “flower garden” is a compund noun - the first noun is used to indicate a subset of what the second noun refers to:
there are many gardens, and a subset of those gardens are flower gardens…
A brief explanation of compound nouns and nouns that are compounds of other parts of speech with nouns:
english4today.com/englishgra … NOUNS4.cfm
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Thanks, yuli. It’s a good thing you’re here to explain these things to me.
Azar’s example was flower garden. Not all dictionaries list flower garden as a noun, but one dictionary does:
[quote]flower garden
noun
a garden featuring flowering plants[/quote]–WordNet 2.0 (Princeton University) dictionary.reference.com/browse/flower+garden
Here’s another example of an adjectival noun, from Harbrace College Handbook, Ninth Edition:
[quote]Functions of nouns
ADJECTIVAL The mountain laurel is the state flower of Connecticut and Pennsylvania.[/quote] (emphasis in original)
Here is mountain laurel as a noun in Webster’s New World College Dictionary:
[quote]mountain laurel
an evergreen shrub (Kalmia latifolia) of the heath family, with pink and white flowers and poisonous, shiny leaves, native to E North America[/quote] yourdictionary.com/mountain-laurel
What kind of noun can mountain laurel be, if not a compound noun? Yet Harbrace says that mountain functions adjectivally in that compound noun.
[quote=“Michael Swan”]378 noun modifiers
It is common in English to use nouns in a similar way to adjectives, to modify other nouns.
379 nouns in groups (1): introduction and general rules
1 three structures
There are three main ways in which we can put nouns together so that one modifies another.
a noun + noun
coffee beans[/quote]–Practical English Usage
Yet Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary and Thesaurus lists coffee bean as a noun:
[quote]coffee bean
noun n [C] Definition
a seed of a tropical bush which is heated until it is brown and then crushed to make coffee[/quote]
dictionary.cambridge.org/diction … offee+bean
What kind of noun is coffee bean, if not a compound noun? Yet Swan says that coffee modifies beans in that construction.
Some of you seem to hold to very high standards. Indeed, on this issue your standard seems higher than that of the grammar manuals.
[quote=“Elsewhere I wrote”]Nomenclature and concepts differ from place to place, and they change over time. I think it’s a good thing to have some kind of nomenclature, though, but in grammar, differences in names or even concepts don’t matter too much to me, [color=#000080]as long as I have the opportunity to get on the same page as the person using them[/color].[/quote] Grammar above my pay grade! - #15 by Charlie_Jack
But I suspect that some folks here rather enjoy not being on the same page.