At the Royal Academy I realised I could never love compost like Mirbeau did

I need a person in a painting before I can really care for it

The lily pond in Monet's garden, in Giverny, Normandy (Alamy)

Some people come alive in gardens. Others can’t overcome the sadness of vegetative quiet. I am of the sad party. Gardens, in my experience, are where we go to die. My father’s ailing Labrador, always a melancholy dog, slipped out of the house and found a lily pond, fringed with ornamental grasses, in which to end his life.

I’ve said goodbye more often in a garden than I’ve said hello. The sight of someone you care for unhappy on a garden bench, lost in beauty but unsolaced by it, is what tells even the most inadvertent lover that it’s all over between you. What a garden can’t heal, nothing can.

And that’s just life. In art, gardens are sadder still. I know that the place of Ophelia’s demise isn’t a garden in the strictest sense. “There is a willow grows aslant a brook,” Gertrude tells, which suggests an untended, lonely place, not the palace kitchen-garden, but nowhere too wild either. The glassy stream in which Ophelia drowns, chanting snatches of old tunes, is not fast flowing or turbulent. It is as though she, in her disordered mental state, sought out a patch of ordered nature to die in.

It certainly looks that way in Millais’ famous painting of her, and Waterhouse chooses somewhere equally moderate for the Lady of Shalott’s goodbye, despite the tangle of weeds in the foreground. But then Tennyson’s many-tower’d Camelot, from which the Lady has to get away, is itself a statement against wildness, a great walled garden of chivalry and restraint, “a space of flowers” where the barley clothes the wold and meets the sky, and another maiden can lose her mind. They liked cleaning nature up, the Victorians; they liked gentle streams and water lilies, and wherever they could find a brook they liked drowning women in it. Don’t call it misogyny. They knew whereof derangement came and why the mirror had to crack. They just couldn’t help finding it picturesque.

I’ve just been to the Painting the Modern Garden exhibition at the Royal Academy, where the gardens are primarily French and the water lilies of the mind are Monet’s. The impulse to restrain nature is just as strong in French painters, and maybe even stronger. More sensuous, maybe, more Utopian, but for that reason – at least to my sense – more sad.

Both French and English artists turned to horticulture to counter the din of cities, the smoke of industry and the rapacity of man, but the French had wars and humiliations closer to home to escape from as well. Hence the craze for artists to build their own walled gardens, seek refuge in the quiet, and take their inspiration from the colours of the flowers they grew.

It was looking at flowers that made me a painter, they all say, until in the end you don’t know whether to believe them or not. But there can be no doubting their devotion to gardens. Room after room of this grand show depicts what can only look to me like retirement, no matter that the number of such works proves that painters of this genre were far from superannuated. Industriously painting their escape from industry – perhaps you have to be afraid of gardens, or at least fear the drowse of cultivation, to find a paradox in that.

They feel like death paintings to me, anyway. High walled tombs of exquisite, voiceless colour. The Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte died of fluid on the lungs at an early age while in his garden. You might need clean air when your lungs are bad, but you must beware the enervation of the natural as well. Before the garden mania got to him, Caillebotte was an interesting painter of urban life, sometimes anticipating the melancholy, photo-realist alienation of Edward Hopper. I prefer this work, but that might only mean I need a person in a painting before I can truly care for it.

Is that because I’m a writer not a painter? Well, the avant-garde writer Octave Mirbeau didn’t think as I do. One learns from this show that he too was infected by the garden bug and wrote to Monet, “I love compost like one loves a woman” – a statement of devotion we can measure only when we’ve heard from one of the women he loved. I can’t imagine “I love you like I love compost” going down well even in a bed of flowers.

Once, when I was teaching liberal studies to hairdressers on day-release at a college of further education in Cheshire, I was accused by the head of science of being man-bound. Whatever he meant, I suspect he was right. But it isn’t because I must see the human physiognomy that I get less pleasure looking at nature where the human face is not. It’s more that I want yet another act in the eternal conflict between man and nature, how it changes us when we fancy we have tamed it, how far we delude ourselves when we think we are in harmony with it, how we might overcome the sadness of being no better than a flower ourselves when the sun shines, or the rains fall, or the glassy stream pulls us down. Eden without Adam or Eve tells no story whatsoever.

I’ve never known the names of flowers. That might be the problem. I don’t know what I’m looking at in a garden. And though many have tried to teach me, none has succeeded. I can see only the idea of flower, not the flowers themselves. So for me the great successes of this engrossing show are such wild blooms of the imagination as Kandinsky’s marvellously vertiginous Murnau The Garden II, painted in blood reds and heartbreak blues, flowers which in actuality never were or could be, and the one-time Nazi Emil Nolde’s fevered gardens, out-naturing nature for lurid colour. I had always thought of Nolde as a decadent, a painter of louche Berlin cabarets and the like – so it just goes to show, even the hellish feel nearer to God’s heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth. Only a pity I can’t.