There are hints of plant forms – a Giverny of light saturated foliage, easy on the eye

A fascination with the garden is at the heart of a new joint exhibition

THERE is a natural syncronicity between art and gardens, although it is often hard won. Garden design is, after all, the ultimate in landscape painting – the hands-on application of colour to living canvas. Many artists create gardens, drawn by the tension between wildness and nature, the colours and forms, sometimes as creation in itself, sometimes as inspiration.

Perhaps the most widely known is Monet, who created the landscapes at his garden in Giverny that would inspire his paintings, digging out the pond whose reflections would produce two decades of Water Lilies.

But there are plenty of other artists elsewhere equally inspired. In Mexico City, Frida Kahlo packed plants into every niche of the courtyard and garden of her Casa Azul, cramming the old 19th-century European-style planting with cactus, prickly pear and sculpture. In Dungeness on the Kent coast, Derek Jarman dug a garden into the shingle, watching the plants struggle and thrive in spite of the wind at Prospect Cottage.

Here in Scotland, I once interviewed an Edinburgh-based artist whose studio window looked out on her carefully planted, formal back garden, its beds full of wild and native plants with curious forms, seedheads and structure, all used in her unstinting and equally fastidious work.

On the other side of the Forth, and the subject of this new Summerhall exhibition, are Liz and Dawson Murray, whose north Fife garden, built up over two decades, has inspired and been inspired by much of their own work.

The two artists, married for some 50 years, work in very different disciplines but are united by this one passion, the subject of The Romance of the Garden.

This is a three-room installation in the old Dick Vet building at the east end of the Meadows in Edinburgh, high-ceilinged, slightly institutional, and very much not a white cube. Dawson Murray’s vibrant watercolours and prints dominate the first few rooms, striations of vivid colour alternating with murkier greens.

The effect is both abstract and impressionist at the same time, rather like looking over a perennial bed in full flower, eyes half shut.

An imagining of plant life, an interpretation of form. There are indications of boundaries, of borders, of hints of plant forms, of shape and texture – a Giverny of light-saturated foliage, easy on the eye.

Dawson Murray has been a lifelong watercolourist after his formative training at Glasgow School of Art in the 1960s and much time spent in Italy. And yet his multiple sclerosis has increasingly added challenges which he has met – to the outward eye – with a determination that has withstood all the unpredictable vagaries of the disease.

Now unable to use his hands to paint, Murray has begun to paint using the motion of his eyes with the help of a sensor which he has helped develop, a staggering technology, and yet more staggering use of it. You do not need to know this to appreciate Murray’s prints,

Their north Fife garden is the inspiration for husband and wife artists Dawson and Liz Murray. Main image: Seed packets. Left: Hint of Dusk, acrylic on canvas, by Dawson Murray. Far left: Hortus by Liz Murray