Abstract: As a new mineral filter material, garnet media shows great competitiveness and broad prospects for water purification applications. In this paper, filtration and backwashing experiments on garnet media were performed to research the turbidity and organic pollutant removal performance and regularity of the variation of head loss. We also investigated the optimum backwashing rate and the optimal backwashing parameters of garnet media. Compared with the performance of quartz sand media, the garnet media shows certain advantages. At filtration a rate of 8 m/h, compared with a quartz sand filter column, the average turbidity and organic content of effluent from garnet filter column were 0.3 NTU and 5% lower than those of the quartz sand media respectively. Moreover, the removal efficiency of a garnet filter column with thickness of 60 cm was very close to that of a quartz sand filter column with thickness of 85 cm, which indicates that the use of garnet media could reduce the volume of the filter, and cut down on investment for equipment. However, the average head loss was 1 cm/h higher than for quartz sand. The head loss was also the main factor restricting the filtration cycle duration of garnet filter column. The optimum air scour and water backwashing range of garnet media was found to be 5-7 and 14-16 L/(s·m²) respectively. The optimal operation parameters of garnet media were determined as follows:air backwashing intensity and water backwashing intensity were 16 and 7 L/(s·m²) respectively, combined backwashing time and single water backwashing were 4 and 7 min respectively. The air backwashing intensity was the most important factor influencing the backwashing efficiency of the garnet filter column. According to our results, the garnet media shows certain advantages for application as a water treatment filter, such as better turbidity removal, smaller size and more efficient volume than the traditional quartz sand media.