In 1935-1936 Ernst painted a dozen pictures (Spies nos. 2176-2191) which share the title Jardin gobe-avions, or Garden Airplane-Trap. These may appear at first to be among the artist's more elusive images, but the subject becomes clearer when one understands the airplane to be the man-made counterpart of Ernst's favorite creature, the bird. The artist had in his library an 1820 treatise on capturing birds, and in his autobiographical notes of 1935 he wrote about "voracious gardens devoured in their turn by a vegetation which springs from the debris of trapped airplanes." The intruder trapped in an alien landscape or interior is a frequent theme in Ernst's work.

In the Garden Airplane-Trap all this was given a double
echo: meaning proliferated within meaning as the trapper was
trapped in his turn and the airplane, once brought to earth,
proved to be even more dangerous than its captor. This has,
no doubt, its parallels in natural history, but for Max Ernst
the parallel lay rather in the field of human relations.
Sexuality has its surprises for all of us, and in any given
relationship the roles of victor and vanquished, pursuer and
pursued, may be exchanged without warning. Those flowered
sprays in the 'Garden Airplane-Trap' look like the trophies of
victory; but they may, equally well, be wreaths laid upon the
grave of some passionate impluse. Inert, cut off to all
appearances from their roots, seemingly no more than ornamental,
they may yet prove to have a demonic power. Everything about
them looks innocent: even their scent is proverbial. But
somewhere within those sweet-smelling entrances, the trap has
been laid. (J. Russell, Max Ernst Life and Work, New York,
1967, p. 116)

The Garden Airplane-Trap paintings lead directly into the densely vegetative landscapes of the late 1930s, in which flora and fauna struggle for existence, and threaten to overwhelm the works of man.