Everything in the secret garden's lovely

Enclosed and Enchanted | <i>Museum of Modern Art,Oxford</i>

Prepare to tut and roll your eyes as you walk into "Enclosed and Enchanted", a new exhibition at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art. If you've ever lost sleep over the Middle-Englandisation of British galleries, then this show in a once-radical corner of Middle England looks like bad news.

Prepare to tut and roll your eyes as you walk into "Enclosed and Enchanted", a new exhibition at Oxford's Museum of Modern Art. If you've ever lost sleep over the Middle-Englandisation of British galleries, then this show in a once-radical corner of Middle England looks like bad news.

For a start, the subject of "Enclosed and Enchanted" is not so much Tracey's bed as flowerbeds: the exhibition is all about gardens. As if the prospect of a MOMAful of nicotiana and Sussex trugs were not sufficiently frightening, the new show takes its title from (dear God) Brideshead Revisited. The first thing you see on entering it is an etching of the gardens of the Villa d'Este at Tivoli by that well-known modernist, G B Piranesi (1720-78): an inclusion that suggests that even MOMA has been struck by the millennial need to fit new art into an historical continuum. (Cf. Tate Liverpool's running-together of Turner and Douglas Gordon; La Beauté in Avignon; etc., etc., etc.) The days when it was enough for contemporary art merely to be contemporary seem to have gone. Women in navy stockings and secateurs wait around MOMA's every corner.

But calm yourselves: appearances to the contrary, this is not Gardeners' Question Time. The Piranesis apart (and why are they there?), "Enclosed and Enchanted" is an excellent show, coherent, focused and with hardly a weak moment in its dozen or so works. All of these have been seen before - The Nature of Our Looking by those hardy perennials, Gilbert and George, is 30 years old - but never before in the same space. By putting them together, MOMA's curators suggest an unexpected strain in contemporary art (not just British, but Japanese, North American and Continental) that has little to do with urban grit and everything to do with herbaceous borders.

Or not quite. In fact, the real subject of "Enclosed and Enchanted" is arguably not gardening, but a shared artistic impulse. The garden in art may have a pedigree that begins (as the catalogue points out) with the hortus conclusus and ends with Peter Greenaway, but the interesting question is: why now?

Look at Jan Vercruysse's offset print series, Labyrinth and Pleasure-Garden, and you will see some kind of answer to this question. The work may look like the blueprint for a set of gardens, but the fact that these will clearly never be built is part of its point. His prints are not portraits of gardens, but descriptors of them: an artificial code for representing a non-existent thing, the formal mapping of formless beauty.

In the same way, Takahiko Iimura's film, MA: Space-Time in the Gardens of Ryoan-ji (1989) translates the abstracted formalism of a Zen dry garden onto celluloid, the artist's 16mm camera flattening Ryoan-ji's raked gravel into a rolling Agnes Martin. MA uses a strict right-to-left narrative to conflate space and time; the tiny gesture with which Iimura ends her tracking shots - a quiet movement from the horizontal to the vertical - takes on the formal importance of the 17th syllable of a haiku. Upstairs, Diana Thater's Oo Fifi: Five days in Claude Monet's Garden (1992) belies its frou-frou name by using the paradox of video as a medium to suggest the paradoxical nature of gardens. Thater's piece is both real and artificial, its central image breaking down towards the edges into the tell-tale red-blue-green spectrum of video. It has no perspectival depth of its own, but steals it from MOMA's gallery space by sliding into its corners and onto its ceiling. Like the garden it works with, Oo Fifi is both a fixed object and an ever-shifting, living-but-dying, ephemeral, flickering thing.

What we're looking at in all of these works is not an act of homage or portrayal, but of distillation. One of the most powerful things in "Enclosed and Enchanted" is a piece called Pollen from Pine by the German artist, Wolfgang Laib. The impulse to make a garden, like that to make an artwork, is an instinct to order nature, to impose a pattern. Laib takes this dual tendency back to its roots by cutting out the middleman; he works with pollen rather than with plants, his forms are simple rectangles. Pollen from Pine is a buttercup-coloured shape on MOMA's floor. You can read it as a piece of minimal art or as a piece of minimalist gardening; all the things that a garden needs (fecundity, beauty, order) distilled into a simple piece of geometry.

The only doubt that lingers at the end of this excellent exhibition is whether it is actually uncovering a trend or merely inventing one. Reviewing the Milton Keynes "New Contemporaries" show a few weeks ago, I asked whether what Clement Greenberg might have called the New Pastoralism in contemporary art existed in the studio and art school, or solely in the eye of the curator. It is interesting that so many gallerists should feel a concurrent need to wander from Modernism's urban, anti-historicist Tarmac into the gentler world of gardens and Gothic palaces. For fear of sounding like an old Trot, it smacks of escapism: but then it is very pretty.

'Enclosed and Enchanted': Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (01865 722733), to 8 October