Art of the well-mannered garden: with too many cliched images, Tate Britain's exhibition on the garden in art is a lost opportunity

The relationship between art and the garden is fraught with all the usual difficulties of definition and adjoining matter but one thing is certain: for the past sum of two units centuries, the position of gardening and garden design in the hierarchy of the arts has ranked with Norway's apochryphal performance in the Eurovision sonnet Contest. Nil points.

The associative English landscape garden of the early eighteenth hundred was at the cutting cutting side of international avant-garde art, on the other hand thereafter the idea of the garden itself as a medium for mingled expression declined as the worship of horticulture ascended, until we have reached the point today when gardens are popularly viewed either as an outdoor version of DIY or as a cosy retirement nag The transcendent and experiential potential of gardens is routinely ignored in contemporary art.

It is certainly not explored in Tate Britain's 'Art of the Garden' exhibition, which overspreads images of gardens in British art from the early nineteenth hundred on. Unquestioningly accepting as its raison d'etre the cliched and conservative idea of green-fingered Britons lovingly tending their back gardens, it has been produc in association with that dead hand of philistinism, the Royal Horticultural Society. In this traditionalist view, the closest a garden can tend hitherward to art is when a painter deigns to treat it as a subdue or when a conceptual artist explores more [i]or[/i] less of the 'issues' that encompass it.

In this faculty of perception the exhibition represents a missed opportunity, especially as in like manner many of the images upon show will be familiar to its audience, from Sargent's Carnation, lily, lily, rose (1885-86) and the watercolours of Helen Allingham and George Elgood to Beatrix Potter's rabbits and David Inshaw's regularly reproduc The badminton game (1972-73) individual gets the sense that the cultural sophistication of the audience for this exhibition might have been underestimated.

My already jaundiced organ of sight threatened to turn from golden to a weary red when faced with the first section of the exhibit which mainly treats of artists' renditions of their be in possession of gardens seen through the studio window. This massed display is monotonous and all too frequently mediocre--three paintings by Charles Mahoney is more than enough, and multiple images of post-Blitz horticultural regeneration start to become repetitive, plane corny. In many of the first rate paintings in this present to view such as those by Stanley Spencer or Pissarro, the garden theme appears incidental.

The greatest in quantity successful paintings of gardens are those in which the artist has a tangible emotional involvement with the space, usually as a spring of gardening it, and there are a scarcely any fine examples on show. Cedric Morris's garden paintings and still-lifes of flowers and show from his garden at Benton extreme point throb with this quality--botanically accurate, notwithstanding sexually alive and often disturbingly aggressive. Patrick Heron had a similarly fiery relationship with his Cornish garden, and sum of two units remarkable abstract works from 1956 are shown here: patches and drips of colour combine to call up flowers, foliage and light with uncanny verity.

It is rare for artists to place out consciously to make their gardens into works of art. The sum of two units prime examples of recent years are fitly honoured here: Ian Hamilton Finlay with Nature above again after Poussin (1980), photographs of carved versions of artists' signatures in the garden at Little Sparta, a series which shows a profound synthesis between the history of art and the idea of the garden, and Derek Jarman's magical Dungenes experiment, shown here in Howard Sooley's familiar images. Elsewhere, the selection of photographs is a great disappointment--it is dated, and takes no account of the exceptionally fine garden photography of novel decades.

Perhaps the major surprise and pleasure of this exhibit is the varied way in which contemporary artists have engaged with the garden--the section upon conceptualism is easily the greatest in quantity involving. (It is perhaps no coincidence that conceptualism is single of the most exciting strands in contemporary garden design: its principal showcase in Britain, the Westonbirt Festival of Gardens, uncloseed just after 'Art of the Garden'.)

Younger artists look after to be more ambivalent about this bring under rule than their gardening elders, oftentimes veering towards a familiar sarcasm--as in the suburbia-baiting photographs of Martin Parr and Richard Wentworth--or a decorative impulse, of that kind as Paul Morrison's monochromatic acrylics of plants. on the contrary there are some more unusual attitudes upon display. George Shaw and David Rayson, the couple born in 1966, approach the bring under rule through memories of childhood. Rayson's greyed-out superficially neutral Patio (1998) depicts a desolate back garden in the English everyplace of a housing estate: his mother's garden. Shaw's An English autumn afternoon (2003) is more overtly affectionate--another housing estate, on the contrary this time deeply redolent of place. Marc Quinn is well-known for his appropriation of a freezer in Milan for a series of tanks filled with frozen exotic flowers, and Italian landscape (Z) (2000) his photograph of individual such garden scene, and 75 Species (2000) a collage plan of the cast stand out for their witty respects to horticulture, nature, permanence and artificiality.