Artistic show depicts botanic garden’s place in the world

Recently the critic Alastair Sooke dismissed “a dreary-sounding exhibition called Plant Scenery of the World”, while another commentator, Laura Cumming wrote that “one keenly feels the lack of an Inverleith House show, now that Paul Nesbitt’s marvellous programme . . . has been so ruthlessly cancelled by philistines. A collection of botanical images doesn’t cut it . . .”

Had either of these journalists bothered to see the exhibition they so casually damn, in absentia, they would have taken an altogether more positive tack. Granted, the maverick curator Nesbitt is not involved here, but his talented colleague, Chloe Reith, is. She has performed a splendid balancing act.

On the one hand, she has heeded the wishes of the powers-that-be who want to see the exhibition programme more closely reflect the presence and work of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. On the other hand, she has worked with many cutting-edge, internationally acclaimed artists.

Reith was tasked with marking the 50th anniversary of the garden’s front range glasshouses. Designed by the architects George Pearce and Allan Pendreigh, the glasshouses were a pioneering example of Scottish Modernist architecture. As well as contemporary artists, Reith has worked with a group of botanical illustrators, and has included an unpublished folio of plant geography by the celebrated bryologist, mycologist and artist Robert Kaye Greville (1794-1866), from which the show’s title derives. Its use here is, of course, at least in part, ironic.

The artists have addressed the place of the gardens from a post-imperial standpoint (botanical collecting was at least in part a product of colonialism); they also address questions of the exotic and the “other”. Each of the rooms of Inverleith House’s magnificent Georgian interior has been transformed into a specific “environment”, mirroring the various artificial biomes in the glasshouses. All of the work here is characterised by its thoughtfulness, its relevance to place, and its interconnectedness with the adjacent pieces. Charlie Billingham has created an immersive space, which references 18th and 19th century interiors. This includes wall coverings emblazoned with a carp-in-a-pond motif; palms, aspidistra and other house plants in outrageously decorated pots; a dressing screen and a pink marble console table. Various paintings borrow from the etchings of Cruikshank, Rowlandson and Gillray, well-known English satirists of the period.

Oliver Osborne also uses irreverent juxtaposition as his modus operandi, linking meticulously painted rubber plants with cartoons and sketches from language text books.

There is a shocking series of depictions of the well-named amorphophallus titanum or carrion flower, by the illustrators Isık Güner, Jacqui Pestell and Sharon Tingey who have created near life-size images of the plant.

Ben Rivers’ film, Urth, set in a dystopian future, typifies his blend of documentary and fiction.

This show is anything but dreary — it is a complex, but fun, interconnected architectural, aesthetic, botanical and cultural ecology that should not be missed.

Until October 29