Anyone who’s been to Monet’s garden at Giverney, or Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness, knows that artists make good gardeners. But do gardens make good art? That is the question Tate Britain poses in its summer exhibition, Art of the Garden.
Perhaps it’s because gardening -like fishing and DIY – is generally a private pursuit. It’s not so much something you tend to do with other people. It’s a contemplative activity that induces a state of relaxation, calm and general wellbeing. So, the Tate show may be the first exhibition to examine the relationship between gardens and British art, but where are the major artworks?
Instead, Art of the Garden quietly opens a door into the private world of the British garden -in fact, the Secret Garden would have made just as good a title for the show. What’s striking about these images is how little our attitudes towards the garden have changed in the last 200 years – from Samuel Palmer’s A Shoreham Garden of 1829 to David Rayson’s Night Garden of 2003, what we see is a quiet, dreamlike place.
I guess it’s not surprising that painters should make fine gardens: colour and composition after all, are at the heart of both painting and gardening. Monet may be the most famous example, but his garden at Giverney was created so long ago that what we see today may bear only a vague relation to the original gardens being, oddly, far more ephemeral than a painting of the most fleeting atmospheric effect.
But the current artistic icon of contemporary gardening is surely the late Derek Jarman, whose tiny garden on the vast pebble beach of Dungeness in Kent has become a modern place of pilgrimage. Jarman’s garden is an inspiring example of how to create a sense of mystery and magic in apparently unpromising surroundings- in this case, a bleak shingle bank dominated by a nuclear power station
But tourist attractions aside, it’s the more personal, intimate images of gardens that say so much about the artist. Some painters focus on a section of their garden, maybe a splash of colour in one particular corner. Or the way a single flower can fill a whole canvas making a strong statement about form, colour or detail. Or perhaps a more impressionistic interpretation may be used where shape and form are loose and sketchy but different hues blend for an overall impact.
But it is precisely this kind of inference about an artist’s character that is so interesting in a piece of art. Art is after all, a vehicle of communication between two human beings and this too can be said about a garden. A garden is indeed a reflection of the people who own it and that is why ‘garden art’ is such a telling and yet natural phenomenon.