If "educated scholars" have no mythical and astronomical insights, they just assumes lot of things, especially taking celestial/heavenly/mythical topics as geographical locations everywhere on the Earth.
The "Garden of Eden" appears in the biblical context of the Creation of the ancient known part of the observable Universe, our Milky Way.
The mythical description of the central creation and formation in the galactic center is allegorized as "the growth in a garden where everything is created". It´s a "place in heaven", also named "Paradise".
I sort of believe it was. If you think of "humans created in the images of the prime female and male celestial figures" you can find the two hemisphere contours of the Milky Way imagined as a woman on the southern hemisphere and as a man on the northern hemisphere i.e. Eve & Adam.
Links:
Eve -
The great Mother Goddess
Adam -
The Greatest God in Heaven
Of course E & A are NOT humans but just biblical/mythical/cosmological descriptions and images of "what´s up there in the Sky!" and what it means for us humans. The galactic Adam and Eve is closely connected to the creation in the Milky Way which center is biblically and mythically called "The Garden of Eden" or Paradise in the Sky.
"Eden" has nothing to do with any geographical location at all.