GETTING out of the city at least for an afternoon at this time of year is always a good idea, as is getting a bit of sea air to blow away the thought of all those sweaty Fringe venues. So it's worth taking a trip to Portobello, where a selection of domestic gardens have been turned into a temporary gallery.

Big Things on the Beach, a local arts trust, has been commissioning large-scale work on the promenade every summer for several years. But this year, in addition to this, they are branching out into the gardens of the town itself.

The Garden Gallery, curated by Amber Roome and Duncan Bremner, has commissioned new work by 26 contemporary artists. Just pick up a map from the library and wander at leisure (all the works can be seen from the street).

Some of the artists have responded specifically to their locations, none more so that Glasgow-based German artist Holger Mohaupt, assigned a ground floor flat in Straiton Place which was once the home of Ned Barney, the first Scot to swim the English channel. Suitably inspired, Mohaupt swam the Forth. The swimming trunks and towel on the washing line are a testament to both endeavours.

Mohaupt has also made works which reference the town's history, both industrial, as home to a major ceramics factory, and its heyday as a Victorian seaside resort. Various artists have chosen to work with this theme, from Nicola Murray's melting ice cream to David Faithfull's fruit machine, with its symbol which references the town's past and present.

Amy Copeman also features seaside imagery in her photographs printed on to perspex and hung from the railings at the end of the promenade. Meanwhile, she has suspended perspex fruit from a tree in Regent Street, referencing not only seaside fruit machines but also the carbon footprint created by importing out-of-season fruit.

Emma Herman-Smith is concerned with green issues too. In a garden across the road, she shows Plastic Forever, an intricately carved sign made from a piece of discarded roofing plastic. Meanwhile, on the promenade, she has made concrete casts of three beehives, a kind of bee mausoleum referencing Rachel Whiteread and Ian Hamilton Finlay and also asking its own silent questions about the worldwide decline of the honey bee.

One of the wonderful things about taking art out of galleries into the everyday world is the way you can almost pass it without noticing, then find your attention grabbed by something you catch out of the corner of your eye. Arran Ross's carved wooden figure blends in so well to its environment that you might be halfway up the street before you start wondering why there was a small spaceman in someone's garden.

Or take the big sunflower peeping through the fence. If you look more closely, you notice that the petals are casts of fingers. It is part of a delicate, darkly funny group of flower sculptures by Jessica Harrison which include rose petals which are casts of her tongue. Duncan Robertson has a taste for the macabre too: he has made a cast of his own head in a mixture of tallow, fat and bird seed, and hung it from a tree where "the local wildlife will gradually transform the work".

The artists have been drawn from a broad spectrum, from traditional sculptors to conceptual performance artists (the remnants of their performances can still be seen). Kenny Munro's concrete head, Hunting for Diana, in an elegant classical stance among green foliage, looks as if it's been in place forever, while the figurative sculpture in red sandstone by Chilean artist Alex Lopez looks out to sea like the masthead of a ship.

Andrea Geile has created metal reeds which sway in the wind and provide perching places for birds. They have a quality which plays with the ideas of natural and man-made, as does the work of Lorna Fraser, who makes ceramic sculptures inspired by botanical forms and has installed a whole greenhouse full of her pieces. And Tim Taylor has populated a garden with a tiny army of three thousand wooden chip forks, each with a face, like a miniature army.

Meanwhile, back in Edinburgh, artist Hugh Brady has created his own platform within the Edinburgh Art Festival by opening a gallery in his garage-cum-studio in Lennox Street Lane. The show could be seen as a series of works, or a single installation made in a variety of media – murals, found objects, abstract paintings, video – and united by a strict palette of black, white and silver.

Inspired by Michaelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow Up, the works probe the notion of an artist's space and an artist's role, while referencing a string of luminaries with their cool, retro aesthetic: Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Christopher Wool, Gordon Matta-Clark.

This is Brady's first show, but he is clearly not a beginner artist. The impression, rather, is of one who has arrived fully formed, with a clear sense of himself and the questions he wants his work to ask. This festival season may be the first you've heard of him, but I suspect it might not be the last.

&149 Big Things on the Beach runs until 30 August; Hugh Brady until 25 August