Why not all is rosy in the garden

The Arts: Some of Belfast's visual-arts shows contain fantastic work, but Aidan Dunne wishes they were quicker to go against the grain

In his introduction to Perspective 2004, at the Ormeau Baths Gallery, in Belfast, the selector, Vittorio Urbani, admits to a weakness for "doll houses and toy landscapes like the ones used for toy trains". It's an interesting revelation, one that helps to make sense of the work he has chosen. That work is not bad at all, and, within the odd, abstruse rules that seem to govern contemporary art, a lot of it is actually very good. But, having made your way through the exhibition, there is a feeling of having witnessed something entirely evanescent and dispensable, of having listened to a series of one-liners. And of having seen something with a Blue Peter-ish quality, as in the case of Andrea Stanislav, who does ingenious things - but not that ingenious, mind you - with pine cones, mirrors and furry toys.

Urbani is a Venetian. He is also director of the Nuova Icona Gallery in Venice, which hosted the Irish exhibitions for several Venice biennales. Urbani has gone on to develop the gallery's contacts with Ireland, and he is an ideal candidate for Perspective or any other open-submission show here. Stanislav's evocation of a fairy-tale forest is extremely low-tech and even offhand, but it is effective.

As regards other low-tech one-liners, there is no shortage: Teemu Hupli's abstract compositions are the momentary patterns made by soap suds while scrubbing a roasting tin; an electric plug and lead perplexingly trail from Laura Wilson's miniature haystack; Grace Ndiritu plays on our preconceptions about cultural identity with just herself and two pieces of patterned cloth as props; Dougal McKenzie offers watercolour studies of pages from a Pelican edition of Herbert Read's Contemporary British Art; Joanna Karolini videos a cleaner polishing the floor of the deserted gallery.

The sense of everything being a commentary on something else continues with Paul Howard's digitally remade reading of Holbein's The Ambassadors, a terrific idea not quite realised in what we see. Karen Tam marshals graphic motifs from Chinese restaurants to present a composite view of a cultural stereotype.

Among the best pieces are Caitlin Heffernan's deconstructed and tenuously reconstructed pieces of furniture, which simultaneously convey a sense of fragility, a liveliness and an element of madness. With hardly any painting on view, Fergus Feehily's gently understated, ambiguous compositions, which evoke systems of varying kinds, are quietly compelling. And Ann Mulrooney's variations in her Rorschach Nation series, in which maps are employed as Rorschach blots, are ingenious. Ergin Cavusoglu's narrative video installation is atmospheric and hauntingly inconclusive.

Art Of The Garden is a huge and hugely enjoyable exhibition originated by Tate Britain and showing in slightly edited form at the Ulster Museum. While it more than lives up to the brief of its subtitle, The Garden In British Art, 1800 To The Present Day, that subtitle also indicates that the show does not bite the bullet and challenge boundaries. In other words, there is no disturbance to the cultural hierarchy here. Artists look at and gain inspiration from gardens in myriad ways. In a couple of obvious examples, those of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Derek Jarman, the artist can set out to make a garden and the garden is the artwork. But there is no traffic in the other direction. Apparently, gardeners cannot join the celestial ranks of artists - not that they would necessarily want to.

There are perhaps other areas left unexplored. Some if not much of the work of the sculptors Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long and Chris Drury could be described as making gardens, or arrangements of materials related to gardens, but it does not feature. And there is no sign of Elizabeth Blackadder, a glaring absence. That said, there is all the same a fantastic generosity to Art Of The Garden, a generosity appropriately equivalent to nature's largesse in providing plants in abundance for utility and pleasure.

From the sheer number of superb examples on offer it is clear there is an extremely sympathetic relationship between painting and gardening. If the English are a nation of gardeners they are also a nation of garden painters, because the painters are certainly drawn to gardens as a subject. One can see correspondences between the two disciplines and, dare one say, arts in the way that, in formal terms, they depend on the organisation of comparable elements - lines, colour, texture, form - within regular, defined boundaries. Of course a painting is fixed and two-dimensional, whereas a gardener will have to contend with additional dimensions - not alone depth but also time and the seasonal changes it effects.

There are some knockout examples of garden painting included. You may well be familiar with Lucian Freud's Garden From The Window. It is as much waste ground as garden, dominated by a buddleia, but it is a virtuoso piece of painting, with its relentless, methodical close observation and description. But as striking and perhaps less familiar is John Pearce's equally obsessive, detailed account of a wild suburban garden. In both these cases gardens that are not particularly interesting as gardens become the material of exceptional paintings. Similarly, Jacques Nimki records common plants in his dazzling Florilegium, making an intricate all-over composition.

Hamilton Finlay has famously made a garden, Little Sparta, and some of it is documented in photographs in the show. Anya Gallacio's installation Red On Green, originally created in 1992, is in a sense a garden, consisting of 10,000 fragrant English tea roses laid on a bed of thorns. It's a lush, fascinating piece, marred only by an obtrusive but inevitable boundary rail around it. As part of a public-art project, Graham Fagen bought the rights to a hybrid tea rose and invited people living in the Royston Road area of Glasgow to name it. It is called Where The Heart Is, and Fagen cast an example in painted bronze, which is beautiful, probably more beautiful than the rose itself. Art Of The Garden is a show to linger over - and the setting couldn't be more appropriate, given that the Ulster Museum is sited in Belfast's Botanic Gardens.

The museum is also hosting the Royal Ulster Academy's 123rd annual exhibition. The exhibition's centre of gravity resides in a core of capable painters who exemplify traditional values. That is, they make solidly crafted work with a representational basis, work that is not tied, however, to a rigid academic formula and allows a modest adventurousness in terms of expressive and other stylistic directions. Such names as Clement McAleer, Joseph McWilliams, Philip Davidson and Brian Ballard come to mind.

The show is very densely hung, with works stacked on the walls, and while a fair proportion of them reach a good standard, there is still a great deal that is mediocre. Even some of the prize winners are fairly lacklustre. It's interesting to compare the RUA's annual with the reinvention of the Royal Hibernian Academy's over the last several years. Of the two, the RHA annual looks far more lively and engaged with the contemporary.

Shot By Both Sides, at the Old Museum Arts Centre, presents an overview of Ulster rock photography from 1977 to the present and, Stuart Bailie writes in the catalogue, defines "the ongoing spirit of an Alternative Ulster" characterised by "enthusiasm, hope and emancipation". These images of passionate performers, nearly all male, in dark, harshly lit venues have a sameness, but they also live up to Bailie's description. There is a fantastic energy and commitment on view and, with the passing of time, a poignancy in looking back 25 years and more. Many of the portraits, including Alastair Graham's of Feargal Sharkey - and Bailie's own work, indeed - are definitive and memorable.