John Dixon-Hunt-Nature Over Again - The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (2009)

NATURE OVER AGAIN
John Dixon Hunt
nature over again
NATURE OVER AGAIN

The garden art of Ian Hamilton Finlay
john dixon hunt
reaktion books
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

33 Great Sutton Street
London ec1v 0dx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2008

Copyright John Dixon Hunt 2008
Reproduction of Ian Hamilton Finlay artworks by courtesy of the Artists Estate.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Designed by Ron Costley
Printed and bound in Singapore
by Craft Print International Ltd
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hunt, John Dixon
Nature over again : the garden art of Ian Hamilton Finlay
1. Finlay, Ian Hamilton 2. Gardens 3. Gardens - Design
I. Title
712.6'092
isbn: 978 1 86189 393 2
For Emily
Friendship is inclination, acquaintance is geography
ian hamilton finlay,
Detached Sentences on Friendship, 1991
Contents
Preamble 11
1 Words of a dead poet . . . 15
2 Garden matters: a tangible image . . . 18
3 From page to garden 23
4 Detached sentences 38
5 Fragments, excerpts & incompletions 43
6 Inscriptions 59
7 Spaces full of doubt 75
8 . . . the hideous process of secularization 82
9 Mare nostrum 88
10 Et in Arcadia Ego 94
11 [Neo-]classical landscapes 100
12 Revolutions 109
13 Errata, or recovered in translation 120
14 Mower is Less 137
15 A solid place 142
16 Gardens matter 148
Appendix 177
References 183
Acknowledgements 195
Photo Acknowledgements 197
1 Nuclear Sail seen across

the Lochan, Little Sparta.
2 The obelisk dedicated

to Claude Lorrain at the
Upper Pool, Little Sparta.
Preamble
3 View of the tempietto at

Fleur de lAir, Provence.
This small book takes up and augments some of my earlier and

scattered commentaries on the gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay. In
particular, it derives from the exhibition of his work that I organized to mark his eightieth birthday in the Rare Book Room of the
Library of the University of Pennsylvania in the autumn of 2005.
Specically, I have drawn upon both the catalogue that I edited on
that occasion (published as a special issue of the journal, Word &
Image, of 21 April 2005), and an unpublished library talk that I gave,
mainly to design students, during the course of that exhibition.
The more generous format of an extended essay allows me to
explore in detail some of Finlays garden creations: two sites in particular are important in this regard, though by no means the only
places where he has intervened. One is his own garden of Little
Sparta in the Pentland hills south-east of Edinburgh, which has
been in process for more than 45 years, and the other, a garden
called Fleur de lAir, completed1 in Provence during 2004 and over
which its owner and Finlay worked for a decade (Finlay in absentia and by proxy of his associate, Pia Maria Simig, since until very
late in his life he had been unwilling to travel). There have been
new publications that bring up to date the documentation of both
these gardens: in 2004 Jessie Sheelers Little Sparta: The Garden of
Ian Hamilton Finlay, with full-colour photographs by Andrew
Lawson and a plan by Gary Hincks of the garden in its latest formulation that included what Finlay himself called new features
not such a happy word, somehow.2 And in the same year, 2004, the
volume produced by Finlays own Wild Hawthorn Press, Fleur de
lAir: A Garden in Provence by Ian Hamilton Finlay, a book of blackand-white photographs by the German photographer Volkmar
Herre, notes on the photographs by Harry Gilonis and an introduction by myself; Hincks supplied a plan of this site as well. These
two gardens have, in addition, elicited a handful of essays and commentaries. All of these, especially the two books, absolve me from
a detailed description or presentation of the sites, freeing me to
make a different enquiry into the workings of Finlays garden art.
11
But Finlay has intervened in several other places the grounds

of the Max Planck Institut outside Stuttgart, Germany; Stockwood
Park, Luton, in Bedfordshire; Schweizergarten, Vienna; the woodlands of the Krller-Mller Museum in the Netherlands, among
others all of which have also produced a not inconsiderable commentary. But then there are sites that have received little attention
within discussions of Finlays garden art St Georges churchyard
in Bristol, the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, various urban
locations in Glasgow and Edinburgh, and even the campus of the
University of California at San Diego.3
The fact is that his garden art has not always received undivided
attention or scrutiny, largely because so many excellent discussions
of Finlay feel obliged to take a very wide-angled approach, given
the many facets of his long career. Thus his garden poetics and
practice have, inevitably, been discussed mainly within the far larger
territory of his other artistic achievements: I am thinking of the
substantial commentaries provided by Yves Abrioux, Stephen Bann
and Harry Gilonis, among other critics, and of the collection of
essays, Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry and Art of Ian
Hamilton Finlay, edited by Finlays son Alec in 1995. There is even,
it must be confessed, a reluctance by some commentators to discuss the garden poetry for its own sake4 a reluctance that comes
in great part, I suspect, either from critics unwillingness to accord
Finlays gardens the same high status that they readily allow his
other poetry, or simply from the unease with which critics of the
established arts confront gardens in the rst place. The temptation
to turn away from his gardens has often been sustained by the
greater ease with which Finlays philosophical ideas can be discussed when divorced from those physical places.5 Yet in several
respects this denies important considerations. By the end of his life
Finlays gardens had come to resume so much of his enormously
varied and extensive earlier work that they may be said to have provided the site par excellence for his characteristic imagination. Since
Finlay opted to bring into his gardens many ideas from his earlier
works, it is in the garden that we need to confront their ultimate
realization. Finally, the garden itself has by long tradition been regarded as a collection, a conspectus, of many ideas that, while they
may have their origins elsewhere, nd their best context and articulation in it; this tradition may also accommodate Finlays landscapes.
So what I wanted to do myself was to isolate Finlays garden art,
in all of its different manifestations, and bring to it my own longstanding concerns with the history and theory of garden-making
12
preamble
or landscape architecture. This meant, certainly, tracking the

garden imagination and inventions back to some of Finlays early,
non-garden art, but it also required that the essay begin with the
gardens and landscapes themselves, in their own right, and only
then invoke Finlays rich and prolic writing and book production
as aids to understanding how he envisaged the making of gardens
in the contemporary world. It is, therefore, to the sites themselves
that I have returned and not primarily to the various archives of
his other work in Europe and the United States. This admittedly
runs counter to the instinct of most of Finlays commentators to
tackle the integrity of the entire uvre.6 Yet if Finlay is to have any
effect upon future garden thinking a topic I shall take up by the
end of this book then the gardens have to stand by themselves
and speak for themselves. Nonetheless, I have retained the term
poetry about Finlays garden work in accordance with his own
best understanding both of its contribution and its place in his
total uvre.
I have tried a Johnsonian overview, an extended meditation
where generalizations could cohabit with detailed analysis and
within a framework that allowed the elements of Finlays garden
work themselves to determine the agenda. What transpired was a
series of separate meditations, each prefaced with a title and an
occasional quotation (many are by Finlay himself, unless otherwise identied). These detached paragraphs do have a logic of
sequence, but I imagine that they might equally be read as separate
mini-essays on distinct topics that pertain to Finlays art of gardenmaking. I have, though, tried to alert the reader, where possible, to
connections that might be drawn between my paragraphs.
13
1 Words of a dead poet . . .

The words of a dead man
Are modied in the guts of the living
w. h. auden, In Memory of W. B. Yeats
4 The Woodland Garden,

Little Sparta.
Ian Hamilton Finlays death in February 2006 at the age of eighty

brought loss, not least in the interpretative management of his
work. He himself, directly or through the commentaries of others,
sympathetic critics, had taught us how we might read his works.
Now or soon enough they will be open to responses and
interpretations that can, will, or even perhaps must, y free of that
authorial and authoritative instruction (it was never a control,
more a pedagogical concern to point us in the right direction
before we were left on our own). As W. H. Auden foresaw in similar circumstances after the death of William Butler Yeats, a poets
works will be taken over by a host of others who did not know him
and who will read him now in another kind of wood; his works
may even come to be punished under a foreign code of conscience. Auden relies upon one of his favourite metaphors of landscape to suggest the new territory through which the poets verses,
his river, will ow in future: so it suits the case of Finlay aptly
enough. His death occurred in the dead of winter, when the world
was numb and unresponsive; the poets demise was kept from his
poems, for notwithstanding the poets demise, poetry survives
now in the valley of its saying; but its verse can be farmed, or it
may ow as a healing fountain. Both those metaphors rely upon
the intervention of those who tend the land or manage its hydraulic resources.
The afterlife of Finlays garden poetry is in our hands; we have
opportunities as well as responsibilities. I have myself mused on
how visitors, now and in the future, will construe the Latin of his
vnda inscribed on huge blocks inserted into the landscape of
the University of California, San Diego (illus. 6).1 And while I can
respond to both the mode of its inscription and the familiar
Finlay device that uses blocks of quarried stone and so situate
my response within the magnetic eld of Finlays own preoccupations and motifs, I am also tempted on that bluff above the
Pacic to entertain other associations that are triggered by the
Latin, by the stones and their carving and by the nearby ocean,
15
5 A distant view of the Saint-Just blocks (the present

order . . . ), Little Sparta, with Lochan Eck behind; the
tops of the brick corvette plinths can just be seen on the
far right behind the hedge. Sheep may be seen in the
background.
6 vnda, University of
California, San Diego.
all now found in another kind of wood, another meadow than

those of Little Sparta, Provence, Stuttgart or Luton. So I recall
Keatss stout Cortez . . . silent on a peak in Darien and taken with
a wild surmise as he stared at the Pacic. Or I hear another poet,
American now, celebrating the veritable ocean on the other side
of this continent at Key West in Florida, an ocean translated
beyond the genius of the sea by a womans singing. I arbitrarily
augment Finlays installation with these new associations: in the
words inscribed and undulating across the huge blocks Finlay, too,
has portioned out the sea, like Wallace Stevens, or surmised, like
Keats, the Pacic unseen below the university campus. Others
voices will begin to ow through Finlays landscape and his
through theirs, mingled measures.
16 words of a dead poet . . .
Yet (always a crucial conjunction in writing about Finlay) our

imaginations are steered by how he writes, by the inscriptions he
inserts in his gardens, more than is sometimes imagined. This will
be necessarily an essential part of my essay. He has, for instance,
constructed several works based on the 1942 Battle of Midway in
the Pacic. Since that conict was conducted entirely through the
engagement of Japanese and American warplanes, it is not much
of a stretch to appreciate his calling beehives into service as aircraft
carriers in a gallery exhibition; in Little Sparta this is translated
into a roundel that is inscribed in Latin and English with the
names of the lost aircraft carriers, but it gains extra signicance
when we encounter it situated within a grove of trees midway
down the hillside from the highest point in the gardens to the
Lochan below. Elsewhere, a slate is engraved with the words
Through A Dark Wood / Midway, with a clear reference to the
famous opening of Dantes The Divine Comedy, where the poet
midway through his life and after emerging from a dark wood
encounters the poet Virgil, his future guide, upon whom Finlay,
too, frequently relies.
Less clearly implicated, however, in those garden references
would be that one of the Midway warships was the Enterprise,
known as the Big E; but the capital e or Greek epsilon is famously
if mysteriously known to have been one of four inscriptions exposed at Apollos shrine at Delphi, in ancient Greece. If the other
three inscriptions at Delphi were clear enough Know thyself ,
Nothing Overmuch and A pledge, and thereupon perdition this
single letter has caused commentators some puzzlement. So, much
later in Plutarchs Moralia, ve characters in a dialogue each propose an interpretation.2 Their solutions are less important for our
purposes than that there are, in fact, ve different perspectives,
each of which is plausible. This possibility of multiple interpretations is entirely typical of how Finlays garden associations work
upon us. There will be some obvious things to discover, while
others involve some lateral thinking (into Dante) or an eclectic
and often encyclopaedic knowledge (battleship names), before we
have put together a sufcient ensemble or complexity of meanings. It is their plurality, the openness to various levels of response,
that matters. Furthermore, given Finlays other invocations of
Apollo, we should not be surprised by allusions to either the Big E
or inscriptions that engage the gnomic utterances of the priestess
at Delphi, nor should we forget that ancient Sparta, as now Little
Sparta, had sent its offerings and its supplicants to Apollos shrine.
17
2 Garden matters: a tangible image . . .

Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and
Solitudes and not of plants and trees.
So how do we confront a garden by Ian Hamilton Finlay? Imagine

for the moment that you know nothing about his work and career,
but that you have stumbled or been directed, without further
information into one of his gardens. What is there? How does it
strike you? Probably you will be most struck by the manipulation
of space and scale. Depending on which one site or which segment
of one you have found, there will be either tight, dense thickets
with shrubs and owers, a strong sense of the kind of enclosure
that surrounds without entirely cutting off an exit, and that somehow asks you to focus sharply upon very immediate, local things,
including the intricacy and efciency of the plantings (illus. 7 and
8). Or, there will be an openness, light and even distance, but
within this generous space the same invitation to attend to some
precise cultural reference that sends you back to the contemplation
of the larger, natural scene around you (illus. 10, 37 and 66). Overall, youll have a strong feel for the physical place, its quiddity or
7 The path with the

names of boats inside
the Front Garden at
Little Sparta.
18
8 Cornucopia baskets at
Little Sparta.
9 Obelisk, inscribed with

il riponso di claudio,
beside the Upper Pond,
Little Sparta.
19
10 wave stones set on

slight ground-swells in the
English Parkland, Little
Sparta.
thingness, its uniqueness, its smells and sights and sounds, the lie
of the land beneath your feet. It will feel accomplished and solid,
a good and tangible place. However wild or apparently unworked,
it will feel inhabited, considered; besides its plants and trees, it will
have Glooms and Solitudes (illus. 28).
You will also be struck, in either kind of space (conned or expansive), with a scattering of things, of stuff, such as sculptural and
usually classical fragments (columns, pyramids, capitals), inscribed
stones or bricks, small buildings, seats and bridges or stepping
stones: perhaps you can recognize some of this as familiar-enough
ingredients in a garden landscape sundials, for instance, or
benches, paths, footbridges, fences and gates, designated planting
areas and bird tables; other items will seem less trite or predictable, but still things that you know youve probably seen in other
gardens or garden centres urns, pots, statuary whole or in fragments, gurines in three dimensions or in steel cut-outs, inscribed
plaques hanging on trees, water channels and miniature waterfalls.
But the longer you linger, moving your eyes and your mind back
and forth across the closed or open spaces, youll also nd yourself confronted with garden experiences that are not particularly
20 garden matters: a tangible image . . .
11 Ripple steppingstones in the Middle Pool,

Little Sparta.
obvious: there will be a great amount of words to read inscribed

stones, distinct lettering on the otherwise plausible urns, and not
just the admonitions of sundials, though those will be there too
(illus. 536). There will also be inscriptions in foreign languages,
sometimes attributed to more or less famous people (writers and
politicians), but also sometimes left to speak for themselves, and
there will be direct references to historical or mythological gures,
some of which youve heard of, but some of whom you are meeting here for the rst time. For most of these encounters you have
to adjust the level of your gaze: many inscriptions are at ground
level and require you to bend or even kneel to decipher them properly an ineluctable aspect of experiencing a Finlay site; at Little
Sparta especially, some of the inscriptions are becoming faint with
age (never having been, for the most part, carved very deeply) and
the garden moss is taking over some of the stonework (illus. 96).
Furthermore there is no obvious, palpable connection between the
various items inserted in the garden, even if their adjacency suggests otherwise: references are scattered, in more ways than one.
Depending on who you are and what you expect of gardens, all
this will be a challenge, a puzzlement or a downright impertinence;
21
12 Sundial bench and

column, front garden,
Little Sparta.
13 The Epicurus herm

and a model of Rousseaus
tomb inscribed Of Flutes
& Wild Roses at Little
Sparta.
it is unlikely to be an experience that is simply acceptable, routine,

ordinary, benign. Finlays gardens, you conclude, are no quotidian, run-of-the-mill places; they are even paradoxical what you
took rst for a good and tangible place now disconcerts, confronts
you with reminders of hostile events. If you are not put off by the
sheer pretension, by an apparent desire to show off esoteric knowledge or foreign tongues, and if you do not dismiss the whole thing
for losing sight of what (you think) a garden is supposed to be
(something like the old poets lovesome thing, God wot), you may
be intrigued by the fashion in which your expectations of garden
scenery have been manipulated and exploited. Thus intrigued, you
may perhaps begin to seize upon hints and suggestions, draw some
connections between otherwise disparate moments or, even, be
provoked to work out what all the fragments are saying, for you
are convinced now that there is something in play here that youd
probably term signicance, meaning, even message. If you have
responded to the fullest extent possible, there will much to digest,
much to consider after and indeed outside the garden once you
have left it; you are maybe tempted to search for further elucidation in whatever published discussions of Finlay you can get your
hands on. There should also be the clear recognition that, if the
garden matters to you, youll need to go back once you have
discovered how the garden may better be visited.
22
garden matters: a tangible image . . .
3 From page to garden

It seemed obvious to me that one could not have a literally one-word
poem on the page, since any work must contain relationship;
equally one could (conceivably) have a one-word poem in a garden,
if the surroundings were conceived as part of the poem.
A dominant characteristic of any Finlay garden is its use, very
economical use, of words. They are everywhere, singly, in phrase
or sentence, attributed quotations or remarks that have the feel of
a quotation, and they also appear in several different languages. If
we think about it, weve probably encountered words in other
garden settings: epitaphs in cemeteries and identifying labels in
botanical gardens are obvious examples, but there is also a long
tradition of garden inscriptions before Finlay from the early Italian
Renaissance to the English landscape garden and the ubiquitous
Victorian and Edwardian sundial. It is a tradition that Finlay has
manipulated deliberately and for which he has drawn upon his
early poetry, proprement dit.
His long career took him from a special and prominent role in
writing, editing and publishing stories and poetry, and concrete
poetry after 1963 to a distinctive position in the modern art of
garden-making. Along the way he has produced hundreds, probably thousands, of images, posters, cards, booklets the invention
and industry are astonishing, and his uvre ranges from the more
familiar postcards or Christmas cards to inscriptions on pebbles
or woven into lambswool scarves or engraved on the weights attached to shermens nets, and even words spelt out in neon lights.1
What characterizes almost all of this production is its verbal economy, for the ambition of concrete poetry was to eliminate much
of the sentimental and discursive clutter of previous verse; Finlays
own endeavour was towards the one-word poem. It is this verbal
economy that nds its true habitat in his gardens: space is limited
in them, so words must work with concentrated energy; equally,
there are other calls upon our attention in a garden, and the verbal cannot always be allowed priority. And, as he came to realize,
what he termed relationship in poetry was crucial, and for that a
gardens surroundings afforded much opportunity.
His non-garden uvre contains innumerable variations on a
series of themes it is as if Finlay were trying to nd the ideal
formulation for an idea, an insight or an image. It is not therefore
23
surprising that when his interests turned towards garden-making,

he would rework earlier writings to insert them in landscape (or,
rather, by inserting them unchanged, have them do fresh work).
Sometimes the original idea was so fertile that it has easily discovered a variety of iterations, of which the garden version seems the
most eloquent: this is the case with the cards, cut-outs and booklets that used graphic versions of Berninis famous sculpture of
Apollo and Daphne (illus. 14);2 they eventually nd themselves
reincarnated in life-size, red and green silhouettes in the groves of
Little Sparta (illus. 40). Since those miscellaneous and ad hoc,
sometimes occasional, writings were a forum for exploring or announcing ideas, it was clear to Finlay that they would hold up well
when they reappeared in gardens, because he believed or came to
believe that landscapes were ideas as much as they are things.3
Some early published writings and graphics did address or
imagine garden and landscape projects, but waited many years
before they achieved some actual garden manifestation. In 1967
Finlay proposed to lay out a grove created as a three-dimensional
version of Antoine Watteaus painting LEmbarquement pour
Cythre, with a succession of slabs taking the place of the pages in
the booklet in which the scheme was plotted.4 Twelve years later,
in 1979, the Monteviot Proposal for the Lothian timber estate was
rich in future landscaping possibilities, and has been called
Finlays most extensive theoretical statement for that reason.5
Here Finlay visualized plaques on trees as an elaborate form of
tree-label; logs as benches, and possible inscriptions for such
wooden tree-seats; uted columns of various shapes, all of which
have materialized in later gardens. The Proposal also included a
very large tree slab (spruce?) inscribed with the Latin names of
trees, each of which contains the letter u placed one above the other;
carved thus into the wood they suggest . . . the stops (nger-holes)
of the ute. This particular conceit6 had appeared by itself on a
card the previous year (illus. 15), before its absorption into the
proposal for the Monteviot estate, where it gained extra resonance
because the anticipated location was a real wood, where each of
the trees the Latin names of which had been translated into
English on the bottom of the card itself would actually have been
[trans]planted, and where the notion of a woodland ute, which
instrument the slab would have been carved to slightly resemble, would also have been realized in the sound of the real wind
in the real trees (Finlays emphasis). The whole scenario of the
Monteviot Proposal, explored carefully and ingeniously on paper,
24 from page to garden
15 a woodland flute,
1978, card, with Ron
Costley.
14 After Bernini, 1987,

lithograph, with Gary
Hincks.
25
has yet to receive its exact three-dimensional version, perhaps

because it was specically conceived for a given site and cannot
exactly t another. Elements of its rich concept, however, have
been singled out for translation into several garden forms: other
versions of the Woodland Flute have been realized both at Little
Sparta and in the Provenal garden, where the mistral blows and
where it is particularly apt to think of Virgils Silvestrem tenui
musam meditaris avena (meditating on the woodland muse
with slender oaten ute).7 Flutes and uted materials are a Finlay
leitmotif, as are both the roll-call of trees with their different
barks (and by implication different modes of boat construction,8
another of his themes) and the insistence so rare in landscape
architecture of sound as a constituent part of garden experience.
What the Lothian site did not explicitly recall was the Arcadian
player of the woodland ute, the goat-god Pan; but he has subsequently assumed his essential role, above all in the re-wooded
enclave of Little Sparta (illus. 85).
Any proposed design for a garden or landscape is usually offered
rst on paper (or nowadays via digital image) before it is accepted
or revised by clients, and nally undergoes implementation on a
specic site. But Finlay has made an art form of the proposal itself. Doubtless the circumstance of producing the elaborate but
unfullled Monteviot Proposal in 1979 was an early inducement to
make the most of the design proposal in itself. But his habit of
working at a distance from a site through intermediaries and via
photographs and annotated sketches must also have encouraged
him to elaborate proposals and publish them independently of
any eventual implementation. Yet they reveal much about how he
envisaged the relationship of ideas and things: the collaborative
association of word and image was always important, partly because
it could be deployed to show how the particular character of the
proposed site its genius loci would dictate the built project.
Equally crucial to Finlay was the role of the proposal to map out
in words and/or images a rich imaginative context for whatever insertion was anticipated. This can be read as a guide, avant
la lettre, of how visitors might respond to what Finlay and his
collaborators would eventually make of the site.
Many of his proposals, in fact, elaborate themes and associations in ways that the eventual implementation might not allow
(or, where it was realized, does not achieve). The proposal of 19856
for Stockwood Park in Luton is an excellent example of the divergence of the eventual built work in substance and feel from the
proposal that Finlay and Gary Hincks originally produced. Their

six engravings do in fact contain the specic items that Finlay
eventually put into the park: a tree plaque, a curved exedra with
inserted plaques, a woodland herm, a buried capital, a scattering
of stone blocks, a column base for a pair of trees (illus. 117, 119, 120,
122, 123). But they are represented in the graphic idiom of Claude
Lorrains sketches and his Liber Veritatis, and they are all absorbed,
if not lost to sight, in the overall depiction of a classical landscape
(illus. 16). Furthermore, they are presented in a manner reminiscent of a connoisseurs portfolio each engraving is printed on
different tinted paper and contained with its own, similarly
coloured folder. Also included are other sheets, including a series
of Detached Sentences on Public Space (illus. 19) attached to a
colophon and several plates that set out the various inscriptions
to be carved on the sculptural items. It is a wonderful and inclusive vision of what Stockwood Park could be, but it is not what the
parkland itself looks or feels like.
There are several things that might be said about this discrepancy. There is always the possible shortfall between vision and
realization; between page and garden falls the shadow. Luton is,
27
16 A print from Six

Proposals for the
Improvement of
Stockwood Park . . . .
17 landscape with a
double tree-column
base, from Six Proposals
for the Improvement of
18 The Flock stones at

Stockwood Park, Luton,
are often used as
impromptu seats.
19 Detached Sentences
on Public Space, from
the Six Proposals for the
Improvement of
too, anything but a Claudean environment, and those who frequent the park are not the staffage of classically draped nymphs
that we see in one of the images. But neither of these objections
seems very pertinent, partly because Finlay was too canny not to
have foreseen them. What, by contrast, he seems to be doing is
using the detailed imagery and texts of his proposal to prepare a
cultural context against which the physical implementation will
be and must be judged. Indeed, the largest physical item of the
Luton proposal, the curved brick exedra with a set of what are
termed the Errata of Ovid (illus. 117), is precisely concerned with
how we must translate or emend certain classical words in order
to understand them in our own contemporary language and culture. Or, alternatively put, Finlay is showing what elements of his
design can be accomplished only in the mind of the eventual visitor who would bring to the actual parkland a mix of associations.
When (as we shall see later) he argues that inscriptions dont have
to be in a landscape as long as they are in the mind of its visitors,
he is anticipating that by some means or other visitors will understand the garden context and thus be able to interpret its texts more
fully. The Luton portfolio then should be seen as a means of priming the imagination of those, admittedly, who are in a position
to consult it as well as setting out the full potential of Finlays
own projected vision.
Other printed or book proposals reveal the same desire to orchestrate a set of cultural associations by which a response to the
designed site may be enlarged.
In 1994 the Wild Hawthorn Press produced a small booklet in
the manner of Humphry Repton for the revision of part of Little
Sparta: a ap showing the current obelisk on the edge of the Lochan
was lifted to reveal a computer model of a proposed Temple of
Apollo. Texts on the following page explain in detail what inscription (from Saint-Just about Apollo) would be inside the temple,
direct us to Walter Paters short story Apollo in Picardy, provide
the dates of both Saint-Just and Pater, all of which are followed by
a page with credits and the Latin tag ne tentes, aut perce (Dont
attempt what you cant nish).9
Other proposals are similarly loaded with information that extends beyond what the site itself would contain, like the proposal
for a sheepfold at the Magdeburg Federal Garden Show in Germany
in 1999.10 References to the pastoral poetry of Virgil and Theocritus blend with an etching by the English Romantic artist
Samuel Palmer, German sentences and their translation, vignettes
29
of sheepfolds and nally a short bibliography of classical, Romantic and modern treatments of the theme. A version of this was
later implemented in the English Parkland at Little Sparta (illus.
20), but, while it uses some pastoral references, it lacks the whole
apparatus of the German card.
Another Proposal for the University of Durham at the Botanic
Garden (1995) mingles the omnipresent sound of bells from the
nearby cathedral with the bells of the many foxgloves planted
around a post on which are inscribed the numerical scoring for
bell-ringers to ring the changes, the permutations giving the place
of each differently tuned bell in the sequence (illus. 21). The
printed version of this proposal explains what one imagines the
site itself would provoke in an alert visitor: The work sets out to
complement the pleasingly variegated nature of the gardens with
their mixture of wild and formal views. Unlike a sundial, however,
[the post] alludes not to the regular succession of the hours of
the day, but to the episodic bouts of ringing which punctuate the
ecclesiastic calendar.11
If the objection to such procedures is that it effectively limits the
numbers of those who will respond fully when they visit the site
without the benet of knowing all the gathered elements of an
original proposal, it must be acknowledged that not only is that
so, but that it is a familiar mode of proceeding by professional
landscape architects that Finlay has, once again, made particularly
his own. Many designers oat their proposals on some discursive
narrative, perhaps autobiographical, perhaps imaginative, of how
they arrived at the nal design, with the implication that this nimbus of story and intention will somehow remain with the built
work;12 this is a product both of the design students studio review
and of the professional presentation to clients. Finlay simply takes
it somewhat further by using the contextual materials to enlarge
our understanding of his proposed interventions, even though
some of what he provides by way of gloss or commentary would
not appear eventually on the built site.
In 1992 he published two designs for Portland, in Dorset, where
the long, narrow and high peninsular known as Portland Bill had
been worked as quarries in many places. One of Finlays proposals was for a Doric temple on the coast, to be inscribed with a
quotation from the Roman Varros De Lingua Latina; the second
was for the Tout Quarry, where a huge, abandoned block of
Portland stone would be inscribed with the words gods of the
earth gods of the sea. The accompanying images reveal what
20 eclogue: folding
the last sheep
inscribed on a sheepfold
at Little Sparta.
21 From A Proposal for

the University of Durham
at the Botanic Gardens
[Foxglove], 1995, with
Ron Costley.
31
the architecture and the inscriptions would look like, but additional texts go beyond what would be visible on site to explain
the affective force of the references by glossing the rst with a
remark of Heideggers on the essence of a temple set against the
space of the air and the surge of the surf , and, for the second,
revealing and quoting at length the source in Virgils Aeneid,
Book iii. Finlay has clearly used his printed work to explore how
gardens and landscapes might provide fruitful contexts or create
relationships between idea and place and between a site and its
projected visitors, sometimes long before he had an opportunity
to realize a design. When they are transformed into built work,
they may often abandon some physical elements and certainly
much metaphysical aura.
Another way in which Finlay has moved from page to site is
through his exploration of the possibilities of the emblem (the
subject matter of his inscriptions will be a separate issue). Emblems
became a fashionable and learned genre during the Renaissance.13
Their fullest elaboration occurred in books where each page or
opening was dedicated to a combination of a brief title (motto or
lemma), an image, a short and sometimes rather enigmatic epigram
(often in verse) appended to that image, and a prose commentary
on the whole that unpacked its meanings. A late example from
Andrea Alciati (illus. 22), whose work in this genre rst appeared in
1531, can be our example, especially since its subject is not unrelated
to Finlays own interests in the terrors of Arcady. Emblem books like
Alciatis may be thought of as compilations or encyclopedias of ideas
and concepts in this particular case: Sudden Terror the scope
and force of which are explained in different kinds of verbal statement along with one eloquent image. They could frequently recycle
received materials and commonplaces,14 which also has its counterpart in Finlays reworking of both architectural fragments and
aphorisms. Emblem collections were designed for use by any artist
or orator who wished to nd verbal and/or visual means to communicate his ideas, and they continued to be used well into the
eighteenth century for that purpose. During the later Renaissance
emblems also morphed into something called an impresa, the intended force of which was much more enigmatic and required some
ingenious decoding, unlike an emblem such as Alciatis, where the
concept of sudden terror is expounded on the page in front of you.
Finlay seized with enthusiasm upon the emblem as a form or vehicle in his publications (he seems not to have registered the different mode of impresa, though he often achieves more of its gnomic
22 Emblem cxxiii
(Sudden Terror) from
Andrea Alciati,
Emblemata . . .
(Padua, 1621).
force rather than employ the expansive and expository leisure of the
emblem). One attraction of emblems is that they allow both visual
and verbal languages simultaneously, and they exploit a relationship
between these, this being sometimes collaborative, at others, competitive. Where emblematists like Alciati would use engraved images, Finlays turn to garden poetry enabled the sites themselves to
supply him with the visual element. Emblems also (especially the
impresa) promote a syntax that can bypass the conventions of verse;
they are thus very closely allied to some of Finlays experiments with
the modern mode of concrete poetry. What fascinated me about
emblems was . . . the brevity of language use in such a very compressed way that the question of syntax doesnt really arise.15
33
23 earth . air . re .
water . time, from Airs
Waters Graces, 1975, book,
with Ron Costley.
Interesting and relevant here, then, are those emblems that

Finlay invented through which to explore the poetry of natural
elements: the book of 1974, Airs Waters Graces, uses the conventional format of image + words to expand our understanding of
ideas we probably take for granted; its title also draws upon the
emblems instinct to relate concrete things (air and water) to immaterial or intangible essences (graces). One (illus. 23), for example,
adds the word Time to the routine assemblage of earth, air, re
and water, whereby we may begin to see the quartet less in terms
of materials than of process. The verbal adjustment sits below a
somewhat enigmatic line drawing, which could be interpreted
both as a cobweb and as the sights of a gun waiting for the ship to
arrive at the targets centre (it is, in fact, a schematic rendering of
24 moorland
marquetry, from
35 One-Word Poems, 1982,
card, with Ian Gardner.
an anteboreum, or type of sundial). Trying to hold the graphic and

discursive elements together in some idea or concept is what their
sparseness and juxtaposition challenge us to do. There is even more
verbal economy in some emblems from 35 One-Word Poems of
1982 (illus. 24), where pairs of words/phrases augment the beautiful, slightly abstracted drawings of different landscapes by Ian
Gardner; their collocations solicit reections or meditations the
verbal puns are amplied and justied by the graphic imagery
immediately above them, but the roundels are themselves to be
read in the light of how we read the words. When this linguistic
format paired words between which we are asked to observe
connections is inserted into the garden (illus. 25 and 57) it is the
surroundings that contribute the necessary visual component.
A nal example of his exploration of the emblem, more relevant now to Finlays garden art (it is in fact a much later work), is
the folding card of 1992 (illus. 26), announcing on its cover: An
18th Century Line on a Watering-Can; inside, the line of verse and
the object pictured, the watering-can, perform the dual verbal/
visual format of a traditional emblem. The line of verse The
mute dispenser of the vernal shower is adapted by Finlay from
25 Three plinths set in

the stream owing
through the English Parkland at Little Sparta (leaf
+ boat / boat + bark /
bark + leaf).
35
26 an 18th century line

on a watering-can, with
Michael Harvey, 1992,
folded card.
Thomas Grays Sweet is the breath of vernal shower . . . The still

small voice of gratitude (in the poets Ode for Music of 1769); the
added emphasis on mute and the suppression of the small voice
of gratitude that would have come from the plants so watered are
a witty (but verbal) acknowledgement of the wordless image of the
watering-can. But to respond in the fullest way to this card means
that we ourselves must unpack its suggestions, including a buried
reference to the arrosoir or watering-can in the French Revolutionary calendar of the months, whereas the commentary in an
Alciati emblem book did most of this work on behalf of its readers.
The transference of such printed emblems from the page into
the three (or, with time, four) dimensions of a garden became a
major preoccupation for Finlay. (The watering-can, in fact, is now
displayed in Little Sparta.) He could count upon the physical
presences of the garden to take the place of the emblems image,
allowing the verbal elements a much more expansive and also more
ambiguous relationship because of their surrounding context. And
in many instances he returned to emblematic formulations previously published on cards and in books, as we shall see, and re-sited
them in gardens with amplied associations. So garden design proposals would often take up an emblematic format of image + word
that already contained a conundrum or implication to be teased
out, and with the new installation give them fresh signicance and
even extend their gnomic quality.
One such garden proposal from 199416 makes this point explicitly. It takes the form of two oblong cards (illus. 27), each folded
over from left and from right and requiring us to open both aps
and read what is underneath (had Finlay been thinking of
Humphry Reptons famous method of tempting his clients with
images of an existing site in this case, a blank and underneath
his own design?). In this proposal we discover that a tree plaque
and a bench are each to be inscribed, with four lines of Finlays
about the sounds of a garden on the one and with a quotation on
solitude from the French revolutionary Hrault de Schelles on the
other. A note on a right-hand ap reads: Whereas a conventional
artwork exists as an independent object, the environmental or
garden artwork is incomplete, perhaps even incomprehensible,
apart from its surroundings.
37
27 A Proposal for the

Garden of Arthur & Carol
Goldberg, West Pound
Ridge, in the State of New
York, 1994, folding cards,
with Pia Maria Simig and
Nicholas Sloan.
4 Detached sentences
I have observed in the garden . . .
many detached thoughts
horace walpole
On innumerable occasions Finlay has adopted the practice of the

eighteenth-century poet, garden-maker and garden-writer William
Shenstone, and composed Unconnected Thoughts on any manner of subjects: on pebbles, for instance, on exile, on friendship, or
on public parks, but most frequently on gardening.1 Shenstones
own Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening were published in his
collected works in 1764. He wrote in complete, even substantial
paragraphs, but generally neglected any logical development between them (its annoyingly hard to locate something that you
know he said in the twenty pages of text!). Finlay, with a characteristic aptitude for terseness (to which Ill return), makes his sentences shorter, sharper, more gnomic. Sometimes he takes one of
Shenstones remarks as his starting point or as a provocation and
manipulates it, but equally often he produces some aphorism that
speaks for his own cultural situation without so to speak glancing
over his shoulder at Shenstone.2 Finlays remarks are now, also,
referred to as Detached, not just Unconnected.3
Finlays sentences on gardening have been issued in several
forms, sequences and contexts, on each occasion selected from a
larger corpus that is nowhere actually provided or cited. These
aphorisms, despite their occasional and seemingly random nature,
in fact comprise a more comprehensive and intelligent concept or
theory of garden-making than the lengthy and ponderous animadversions of most landscape architects and design critics rolled
into one. One example is reproduced here as illus. 28. Its range of
observations cover the whole gamut of garden matters from
making as process, questions of scale, meaning, the role of owers,
inscriptions and lawns, to our reception of them. Its perspectives
vary from the political to the environmental, from the artistic to
the functional, from cultural messages to material concerns like
weather and compost. Many of these aphorisms have become justly
famous: Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are
really attacks a claim that obviously seems to sustain much of
Finlays own garden work. His contempt for the mere banality, the
38
secularism, of contemporary garden culture emerges from remarks

on modern sculpture (wilfully ignorant), art museums, garden
patronage and garden historians. But there is also his wry acknowledgement of the nancial onus of garden-making or the sheer hard
work of everything from envisioning to weeding and watering.
It is, however, wholly characteristic of Finlay that these sentences
are not offered as a body of theory; or if it is perhaps a body, it is
one dismembered, its various limbs and sinews detached from anything but the page on which they nd themselves displayed (or
splayed) on any one occasion. In this way Finlay also distances himself from any personal involvement in these utterances, another
point to which Ill return. This detachment or lack of logical or narratival connection also alerts one to an essential element of garden
art in general that Finlays particular perspective further endorses:
39
28 Unconnected
Sentences on Gardening,
from Nature Over Again
After Poussin, 1980,
booklet, with Sue Finlay.
gardens cannot deliver an overall message or story; what they can

do, however, is trigger and prompt visitors to formulate their own
larger visions and versions from the unconnected fragments discovered in the garden. This is surely what the eighteenth-century
garden historian and commentator, Horace Walpole, meant when
he observed . . . detached thoughts in gardens: what Finlay adds to
this perspective is the implication that it is for the visitors who
stumble upon detached thoughts in a garden to make of them what
they will. The detached sentences on the concepts and practice of
gardening in both the private and public sphere (illus. 19) are, of
course, the equivalent of the fragments and inscriptions inserted
into actual gardens, except that Finlays published sequences are
gathered together on one page, whereas the inscriptions tend to be
scattered throughout a garden or landscape where their signicance
can be exponentially enlarged.
The unconnected sentence and the detachment of the self from
its utterance derive from Finlays early commitment to and explorations of concrete poetry. In the concrete poem, the word or
words stands or stand alone, enjoying and creating their own aura.
Notionally without connotations, perhaps even denotations, the
expressive power of the linguistic medium itself is emphasized,
strongly enhanced by its typographic or engraved presentation
(here Finlays own contribution, or rather that of his collaborator/
calligrapher, is distinctive). The concrete poet has absconded
from his creation, leaving the linguistic fragments for his readers
to use as they will. In fact, we often encounter on his page Finlays
re-presentations of words that he has himself found elsewhere:
names of boats and ships discovered in nautical almanacs, for
instance, or his imitation of dictionary denitions a cross-breed,
Id suggest, of concrete poetry with emblem (illus. 82 and 83).
Hence the concrete poet Eugen Gomringer, to whom Finlay pays
homage and with whom he corresponded from 1962, called the
concrete poem a functional object; in other words, it has a function like many other objects; it subsists by itself, as Franz Mon
puts it, to be used as any reader wishes.4
The brevity or terseness of the concrete poem also responded,
as Gomringer implied, to our need for swifter communication.5
In his search for such concentration and simplicity, Finlay tried at
one point in his career (as we have seen) to pare down the concrete
poem to one word. But he realized quickly that this wouldnt really
work (see the motto to the third paragraph above); so he would
devise other means of presenting the singular word. Maybe hed
40 detached sentences
29 Schiff, 1973, folding

card, with Ron Costley.
30 Schiff in the Max
Planck Institut grounds,
Stuttgart.
repeat the German word for ship, but now upside down so wed
see it as reected in water (illus. 29; cf. illus. 30); or hed arrange
words in a sequence that alerts us to the trans-linguistic identity
of the thing called wave (illus. 31); or hed pull the same word
apart, detach its rst letter and release the Ave from it, the Latin
greeting of hail (illus. 32); or he added titles or images (in the
41
31 5 words, card, 1986.

These words for wave in
ve languages are also
inscribed on stones in the
English Parkland at Little
Sparta.
32 w ave inscribed
around a pillar at the
house at Fleur de lAir.
manner of the emblem book, illus. 24) to single words or phrases.

But to take one word and give it meaning through a new context
was best effected by transferring it from the page altogether, as
some of these examples show. The most fascinating and richly
suggestive of these fresh surroundings into which the single word
could be reintroduced was the garden. Thus we nd wave and
its equivalents in other languages seeking and achieving new relationships, even new completions, in Finlays various landscapes:
the Latin vnda at Little Sparta, in Stuttgart and in San Diego;
the ve blocks engraved with the word wave in different languages,
rst published as a card,6 now scattered in the English Parkland
at Little Sparta, each stone resting on a slight billow of grassland
(illus. 10). It remains to be asked whether and indeed how and
why the garden context is able to extend the function of Finlays
verbal insertions.
33 vnda in the Max

Planck Institut grounds,
Stuttgart.
42 detached sentences
5 Fragments, excerpts & incompletions

Consecutive sentences are the beginning of the secular
Finlays penchant for the fragment, for incompleteness, for the

excerpt, is linked to his refusal of the secular. If, as he writes,
Consecutive sentences are the beginning of the secular, we may
therefore suspect that a preference for isolated sentences, fragments or excerpts is yet another route or access to the sacred as
he wished to reconceive it (and which another paragraph will
confront directly).
The sacred includes what we cannot materialize, the noumena
that we infer from tangible phenomena that are by themselves
incomplete or empty of meaning. Fragments in a Finlay garden
quotations out of context, solitary words, broken sculptural items,
startling intrusions of the unexpected are like icebergs, just the
tips of a world that we cannot see but must assume to be there,
fractions of a larger and mysterious world under the surface. Finlays many waves in whatever language function in this way, as
scraps of a larger ocean, as tokens of the sea that is absent from all
of his sites, yet almost obsessively remembered in each of them
and associated with a sublime that is cognate with the sacred. Lest
we miss how a wave is indeed a fragment, an excerpt from a larger
body of water, twice at Little Sparta and in a landscape outside
Stuttgart in Germany (illus. 34 and 35) Finlay inscribes a plinth
with the lapidary Latin sentence hic jacet parvulum quoddam
ex aqua longiore excerttum, an epigraph previously published as pond-stone in his volume of 1967, Stonechats (Here lies
a small excerpt from a larger [literally, longer] water).
Read on a plinth emerging from a pool in the grounds of the
Max-Planck Institut near Stuttgart, the words now say only that
the small body of water is simply a sampling, an epitome, a representation in miniature, of a much larger expanse. More potently
at Little Sparta, the same inscription sits beside the Temple Pool
and is one of the rst items to strike visitors as they enter. It is now
inscribed on an upright stone of the sort youd nd in a cemetery,
so that the Latin calls perhaps more attention to its opening words,
hic jacet . . . , the here lies of the conventional gravestone. This
43
34 The hic jacet . . .

stone at the Max Planck
Institut, Stuttgart.
is apt, since the fragment, the excerpt, also signals a loss, if not
a death, to be memorialized. We are therefore asked to lament
the absence or the passing of some more complete wholeness, or,
alternatively, to discover in the fragment a means of apprehending some fullness that consecutive sentences could not deliver for
all their extended and discursive effort.
Whereas the hic jacet stones refer explicitly to water in both
its small and extended masses, the idea of an extract or diminished
segment runs through other garden items.1 The classical fragments
used so often by Finlay columns, capitals, urns, altars are obvious examples extracted from former buildings and cultures by
either the hand of man or the depredations of time. But stands of
small trees in a circle, a frequent planting scheme at Little Sparta,
are extracts of the larger woodland or forest and have their own
name, grove or bosque. One such circular stand of trees on the
hillside (illus. 37) has at its centre a stone inscribed with
In a Sweet Harmony
and Agreement
with it self
grove
and while that self-contained quality comes, obviously, from the
gardeners design and planting, a groves elegance draws its inspiration and its achievement from the random woodlands whence its
own trees have come. Another element a carefully constructed
length of dry-stone wall, one in the English Parkland, others at the
highest point of Little Sparta (illus. 143) is an extract from the
44
fragments, excerpts & incompletions
35 The Temple Pool

at Little Sparta and the
stone inscribed with
hic jacet . . ..
37 A grove on the hillside, Little Sparta.
36 Toppled column,
Little Sparta.
38 Walling with an
inscribed plaque in the
English Parkland at Little
Sparta.
45
most conspicuous feature of northern British moorlands, where

dry-stone walls run up, down and across the hillsides: in the garden we have simply a small excerpt of this ubiquitous and local
cultural phenomenon.
There are several more things to say about Finlays reliance upon
fragments and incompletions, including partial quotations or quotations offered without context. Whatever their effect or intention
in printed material outside gardens, within his landscapes, which
is where many of them have ultimately to be registered, they make
exceptionally clear the refusal of any narrative or any extended exposition of ideas in his designs. Take, for instance, the nine works
made rst for a garden show in Grevenbroich, Germany, and now
permanently there. Other than taking for the most part the form
of familiar Finlay sculptures tree plaques, inscribed benches, a
bust, a signpost and a pergola and referring, however gnomically,
to gures encountered elsewhere Rousseau, Caspar David
Friedrich, Puvis de Chavannes or Hlderlin these items no longer
make up a narrative or even suggest a coherent framework in
which we could accommodate them. As they are encountered in
the woodland, they make their own separate statements, a series
of what Luke Morgan has termed garden topoi,2 triggers for any
number of ideas and eeting memories, depending on the visitors
resources. The pyramid at Grevenbroich is presumably a tomb, but
the dates 17741840 carved on it without further explanation do
not take us much further. Maybe an educated German visitor
would register the dates of the painter Friedrichs lifespan, or recognize that they dene an era of great German Romantic poets,
painters and philosophers. But still we have just fragments of an
undisclosed history.3
One of Finlays detached sentences says Embark on a garden
with a vision but never with a plan, and this refusal of a plan involves also the refusal of any overall narrative or message. More
literally, in neither of his two major gardens is there any hint or
suggestion of how a visitor might negotiate its spaces; even if the
spaces were to be (or indeed could be sequentially) numbered on
a plan, merely following the keys numbers on the ground would
not yield any completeness (see Appendix). Indeed, there is no selfevident way to proceed through either Little Sparta or Fleur de
lAir; the latters terraced hillside of olive groves offers its own distinct invitation to move downwards from the house, but the horizontal spaces of these descents complicate any plausible sequence.
Where there is no prescribed route in a garden, any opportunity
46 fragments, excerpts & incompletions
for narrative or logical sequence of events is eliminated. The implication is that garden design should eschew any overall story or
narrative, and this gibes with Finlays fascination with fragment
and incompletion. So I nd myself (unusually) in disagreement
with Stephen Bann one of Finlays most accomplished commentators when he writes that Little Sparta consists of transcriptions
[into an environmental scale] of reading conventions like the
sequence of pages.4 Gardens are not books, and any predetermined
sequence of pages in them is implausible. Even when, as at Little
Sparta, we encounter a sequence of phrases set in place one after
the other as with the dry-stone walls (illus. 143) or less plausibly
the corvette stones (illus. 94) they still do not constitute a narrative; it is the visitor, of course, who may choose to make one.
This seems to me a most important lesson, especially in the face
of those who wish to nd readable narratives in landscape architecture.5 Landscapes are not in themselves texts; for the one central
yet simple reason that they have no structure like the printed
sequences of a book by which their visitors could follow a story or
plot with condence and without undue distraction.6 What landscapes can do at their best, however, is suggest single, even resonant,
ideas or concepts, including images, that may already have an extended and discursive life elsewhere but which cannot rely upon that
in a garden.7 Francis Edeline, noting the constant temptation to read
especially Finlays own garden as if it were a book, nonetheless
agrees on the need to meditate within its spaces: his garden, a book
that you cannot leaf through but where its good to stop and think.8
47
39 Little Sparta the

small stele to the left
references shing-boat
names, the obelisk is
dedicated to the painter
Claude Lorrain.
And this is Finlays distinctive contribution to the whole topic

of meaning in contemporary gardens: he introduces what are in
effect fragments of a larger historical event, narrative, even philosophical idea, or maybe partial references to works of art or literature, and leaves it to visitors to make something of them in the
new context of his garden that will, however subtly, inect their
original meanings. This is not to say that his critics cannot provide sustained narratives or conceptual accounts of Finlays work
by tracking his garden quotations and references back to his
sources; but that resource is available to the gardens visitors only
in piecemeal, partial ways, and sometimes not at all; if weve done
some reading, or even can draw upon an extensive general knowledge, well derive more from our experience; the more we can
bring to the garden, the more we can take from it. But Finlay would
not oblige visitors to his gardens to share his own detailed and
often eclectic knowledge.
For all his fascination with the eighteenth century, Finlay never
referenced Lawrence Sternes novel Tristram Shandy, but it may
nonetheless serve us well in grasping how his gardens interact with
their visitors. Tristram Shandy is famous above all for its conviction that a story is not as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk.9
It taunts its readers . . . who are no readers at all . . . [that] nd
themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from
rst to last . . . (i.4). It plays lovingly, continuously and seriously
with contemporary psychological explanations of the minds
workings, above all with association of ideas (i.4), and with encouraging its readers to adjudicate the succession of our ideas
(iii.18) for their aptness and usefulness. It also addresses the play
between verbal and visual languages and their different abilities at
translating concepts and experiences, which is a skill very much
needed inside a Finlay garden.10 These themes can help to elucidate the many stimuli that Finlay offers each visitor, who may then
translate these encounters into some coherent whole (or not, of
course). Reading Sternes novel also enacts the simultaneity of
observation and reection that is equally necessary in gardens,
where different pieces of information are available without any
precise directions on how to imbibe, sort or otherwise use them.
Actively encouraged by Sterne in his persona as Tristram, we begin
reading the novel (as we do upon entering a garden) by putting
together from bits and pieces some version of the whole without
waiting for the false luxury of retrospection to become available.
In this Sterne also plays with his responsibilities as an author who
48
seeks from an accomplished and attentive reader a major role in

putting together the story of Tristrams life and opinions; sometimes this reader loses his/her way, but sometimes can be more
accomplished even than the author himself: The truest respect
which you can pay to the readers understanding, is to . . . leave
him something to imagine . . . (ii.11). That Tristram Shandy is
unnished (locally the blank, black or marbled pages but also
overall, with the storyline petering out in volume ix) only pushes
some readers, now turned literary critics, to devise explanations
for the whole that Sterne never achieved or authorized.
Gardens enjoy the same refusal of overall and lucid structure, if
only because they are rarely if at all constructed with one specic
and unavoidable route. They have their hesitations, blank spaces,
insistent prompts, possible or plausible as well as implausible digressions, all of which tempt and repulse our search for meaning,
both during a visit and even afterwards in retrospection. And a
garden like Little Sparta though it has been photographed often
with a focus upon discrete items that imply concentration and
coherence in our response offers in practice a scenery where
several different demands upon our attention are made at the
same spot and where it is difcult to register any logical connection between them, let alone any clear sense of how we should
proceed between them (see illus. 13, 79, 103). To quote Sterne again:
my work is digressive, and it is progressive too, and at the same
time (i.22); or again, now with a landscape emphasis, the visitor
will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his
eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he
can y (i.14). And this strange combination of ideas, the sagacious
[John] Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things
better than most men, afrms to have produced more wry actions
than all other sources of prejudice whatsoever (i.4). For people
tend to get a handle on things a novel, a garden as it suits their
passions, their ignorance or sensibility.11 It follows perhaps that all
associations, all sudden starts, or a series of melancholy dreams
and fancies (i.2) that may be entertained by visitors and critics of
Finlays gardens, have some place, some validity in the gardens
profuse and intricate whole. Indeed, nothing that has touched me,
writes Tristram, will be thought triing in its nature, or tedious
in its telling (i.6).
Everywhere in Little Sparta, Stockwood Park and Fleur de lAir
are incidents that function to trigger associations, some of which
will draw upon experience and knowledge acquired outside the
49
40 Apollo and Daphne

(after Bernini) in the Wild
Garden at Little Sparta.
garden, while others will bafe because such access is immediately

unavailable; none of them is complete in itself, though many are
self-contained. Some examples will be useful. At one point at
Little Sparta we encounter two gures in cut-out steel, one (in red)
apparently in pursuit of the other (painted green) eeing through
the shrubbery (illus. 40). Maybe all we can do is to respond to two
painted silhouettes secluded in a dense part of the garden, one
seemingly chasing the other; the red suggests aggression, the green
something more passive. Perhaps we recognize the gures as a twodimensional rendition of Berninis well-known sculpture of Apollo
and Daphne in the Borghese Gallery in Rome; maybe we can call
upon some memory of their story, even the version told in Ovids
Metamorphoses. In that event we amplify the chance visual discovery with our own literary recollections; possibly we can further
augment our garden experience here by recalling Andrew Marvells witty claim that Apollo deliberately chased Daphne, not for
sex, but precisely because he was enamoured of the colour green
and knew that if he pursued her she would change into laurel! But
we can also go much further: as we come across several more references to Apollo throughout Little Sparta, including his being
the tutelary deity of the Spartan lawgiver, Lycurgus,12 we could put
together a whole meditation upon the various powers of this protean god, even including the idea that Apollo is a gardener,13 but
always with the uneasy sense that we are asked to read classical and
poetic myth as potent, contemporary metaphors. Yet the original
stimulus, the fragment of all that possible reection, was a twodimensional silhouette, onto whose reduced form we project our
associations.14
It follows, too, that Finlay implicitly accepts that people will respond in various ways to his hints and quotations. The crucial
garden experience is therefore somewhat different from the literary
response to his writings: in the latter there are often explanatory
contexts, above all in various commentaries on his work, whereas
in the gardens there is no immediate help at hand, no appended
footnote or gloss to direct response. Another case in point may be
the inscription of the single word picturesque, discovered on a
sloping fence rail that slips into the waters of the small articial
pond, Lochan Eck (illus. 41). We may, of course, simply ignore the
word and enjoy the scene (I actually think I missed the inscription
on my rst visit in the rain, arriving from the opposite direction).
51
41 Fence inscribed
picturesque, and the
Goose Hut across Lochan
Eck, Little Sparta; a stile
in the far distance.
Or we may accept it as a suggestion that the view here is somehow

picturesque. Equally, we could stop and ask what exactly is picturesque about this particular place maybe the word is intended
ironically, a joke at our expense because we want picturesque experiences or because we daily trivialize the word by mindless
overuse; so Finlay could be having fun with a tired, old warhorse
of a label. We have, after all, only reached this broken fence after
moving through the much more obviously Picturesque, contrived spaces of the lower gardens, where references to Drer,
Edward Atkinson Hornel, Claude Lorrain, Poussin and Corot,
among others, would have more precisely directed our attention
to how the garden recreated or recalled earlier paintings (see illus.
424). We could perhaps recall different Romantic landscape
painters, like John Constable, who loved the formal properties of
old rotten banks, slimy posts.15 The single word inscribed on a
sloping rail is itself a fragment, just as much as the random bits
and pieces of the natural world admired by Picturesque theorists.
Perhaps now with more acquired knowledge we know that the
important theorists of the Picturesque, like William Gilpin,
Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight and perhaps Humphry Repton, were in their own day every bit as radical within their chosen
eld of landscape architecture as those other revolutionaries
Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Just were in politics. Little Sparta
nds room for all these revolutionaries, because their ideas all can
be presented as having a continuing, if changed presence among
us that shapes our negotiation with the world.
The picturesque fence and our various responses to it make
clear that there must exist levels of response as there do levels of
meaning. In one of his detached sentences Finlay says that The
inscription seems out of place in the modern garden. It jars on our
secularism by suggesting the hierarchies of the word. This, of course,
addresses his conviction that the modern world has forfeited its
ability to be reverent, to nd sublimity or awe in, for instance, the
forces of nature, in short to be attuned to what may be called the
sacred. But the remark also acknowledges that the verbal has different levels or hierarchies, what linguists call different registers.
Each of us will reach for the level of language and reference that
suits us and with which we are at that moment most comfortable.
The essential thing is to recognize that there are levels, neither just
one lowest common denominator of response nor just one high
plateau of learned commentary, and also that these hierarchies are
porous rather than self-insulating. That is one of the functions of
52
42 Finlays lettered
plaque with the entwined
initials ad (Albrecht
Drers monogram)
recreates Drers watercolour, The Great Piece of
Turf, beside the Temple
Pool, Little Sparta.
43 See poussin / Hear
lorrain at Little Sparta.
44 The clavdi bridge in

the Woodland Garden,
Little Sparta.
the fragment, that its completion is open-ended and its achievement, heterogeneous.
Visitors confronted by the fragments and quotations in Finlays
gardens are as likely to be nonplussed as immediately appreciative,
which irritates some of them no end. American design students,
for example, have difculty with stiles because they dont exist
in the United States, and even as visitors to Great Britain theyd
get to know this traditional feature only if they were to venture
out into ithe countryside where rights of way must occasionally
negotiate a wall or fence by some ingenious means that facilitates
progress while still segregating enclosures (illus. 45 and 46). The
words inscribed on the stiles at Little Sparta (illus. 82), however,
53
45, 46 Two stiles at

Little Sparta.
54
and again on different versions of them at Fleur de lAir, provide

clues as to how the philosophical mode of the syllogism (thesis
antithesissynthesis) can suddenly and wittily be given local,
landscaped form in the stile: the thesis is the need to cross over;
the antithesis is the wall that stops us; the synthesis, the stile that
gets us over. Furthermore, there are different styles of argument
as of contrivances (stiles) for crossing stone walls or fences.16
Another item also draws upon local cultural knowledge, for only
familiarity with both English country lanes and the notion that
they always meander (the rolling English drunken made the rolling
English road of G. K. Chestertons poem) will make immediate
sense of an element in the most recent part of Little Sparta, the
English Parkland, where in an absolutely straight lane between
hedges a bench tells us that A lane need not meander (illus. 47).
Once the visitor reads that inscription, however, he or she may
notice that the approach from both directions to the entrance
into Huff Lane has been by meandering paths! So this play with
forms, which was a central aspect of the historical English parkland, offers an alternative access to the joke about straight lanes.
Furthermore, in this same area of the parkland is a similar formal
device, whereby a straight platform of granite sets laid between
55
47 Huff Lane at Little

Sparta.
48 In the English Parkland, Little Sparta: two

circular sets of stones with
inscriptions from Virgils
Georgics at their centres,
bisected by a straight path
that leads to a curving
alley of gooseberry
bushes.
two equally regular circles of stones in groves takes the walker into
a winding path between currant bushes (illus. 48).
Throughout his designs, Finlay inserts isolated quotations, admonitions, even jokes and double entendres: the Achtung Minen,
with its skull and cross-bones, at Little Sparta marks the place
where the underground electricity cable comes in and so warns
gardeners against digging there. But there are also insertions of nonverbal fragments, or items that at rst sight seem so urns, slabs,
broken architectural fragments; though upon closer inspection
many of these are inscribed, they function in the rst instance as
formal objects in the landscape: the sloping fence of picturesque
is one example, so are the stiles, many of the different brick paths,17
scattered urns and column fragments, like the buried capitals discovered both in Stockwood Park and at Little Sparta (illus. 49). Some
inscriptions have weathered or, because of shallow carving and
the play of bright light, are barely readable (illus. 96). The marble
basket of lemons at Fleur de lAir stands out on the terrace immediately beside the house (illus. 64), but it takes more time to notice
the words carved into the glaring white stone plinth, and perhaps even longer to recognize them as Goethes nostalgia for the
warm south.
Finlay, then, works constantly to catch our eye, to provoke our
memories and associations. The benches down either side of the
emphatically straight Huff Lane are all inscribed with a variety of
49 Buried capital at
Little Sparta.
remarks about lanes, prompts to the visitor to reect upon the

whole concept and culture of country lanes. But the fragments
also work at a further level. These apparently random and isolated encounters in a garden are usefully considered as topoi, from
the Greek that means places, but in its modern usage links some
idea with a somewhere, someplace hence we have the word
commonplace, that is a place that is common to many and
thence a familiar and recurrent idea. Finlay uses topoi to reintroduce or refurbish ideas that often had a frequent, familiar and
lively life in the past, but with which we may have lost touch.
Sometimes these are ideas that he has played with in earlier, nongarden contexts, and that he recalls for us in sites that will allow
them greater power or signicance. Old commonplaces are thus
brought back into circulation and in his garden work are reassigned to new topographies. And there they promote ideas,
issues, topics, or what have been termed considerations of a
general nature that would be shared by many people and subjects,
the themes or arguments capable of joining a speaker to an audience.18 Furthermore, Finlays repetition of certain inscriptions and
items in different locations underscores that they are to be
deemed commonplaces: when we nd buried capitals in two different sites, when we discover man a passerby in the grounds
of a private house, not far from Little Sparta, as well as in Little
Sparta itself (illus. 50), or when we nd along the main street of
57
50 man a passerby . . .
at Little Sparta.
51 Sundial in Biggar,
Lanarkshire.
the neighbouring town of Biggar (illus. 51) one of Finlays sundials that reuses themes from his own garden, we must be struck
by how much he deploys these reiterations as a means of insisting upon their endless and ubiquitous importance.
58
6 Inscriptions
An inscription need not actually exist in the landscape; if it is in
the consciousness of the viewer it is in the landscape.
Nothing identies a Finlay garden or landscape installation more

immediately than its particular habit of relying on inscriptions. As
he writes: Inscriptions are the best part of a garden as decals are
the best part of Airx kits.1 They appear in several languages, maybe
accompanied by English versions (illus. 61); they are sometimes
identied as quotations or at other times left for us to attribute; and
they are not always sufciently articulated to be instantaneously
recognizable either as quotations or even as clear statements in their
own right. They are part of, though they do not necessarily take the
form of, fragments, excerpts and incompletions.
Garden inscriptions (as opposed to sculptures or temples) are
relatively inexpensive, which was one reason why they were the
favourite device of the eighteenth-century gardener William Shenstone, who created The Leasowes with very reduced resources.
Finlay, in similar circumstances, undoubtedly found that justication equally valid, and saw in Shenstones example a viable, modern mode of garden art. Indeed, in 1992 Finlay paid his own
homage to The Leasowes precisely by proposing to install and inscribe a stone seat there (illus. 52): the published pamphlet remarks
that A bench, in our modern gardens, is a thing to be sat upon;
in Shenstones Leasowes it was a thing to be read. On the bench
itself one would have been able to read an extract from a wellknown contemporary account of Shenstones distinctive landscape
describing a path besides a small bubbling rill . . . . Finlay noted
that though the rill still existed, it was hardly so active as in the
eighteenth-century account, and that the inscription would restore the original experience of a lively stream.2 As that proposal
suggests, Finlay expects his inscriptions to do a lot of work for the
garden, as well as for attentive garden visitors.
Gardens have traditionally had recourse to inscriptions the
words on a sundial would be an obvious example that Finlay has
frequently emulated (illus. 536). Part of their appeal has been that
they were the means of bringing an outside world into the garden
through the simple expedient of alluding to it, or reminding its
59
52 From A Proposal for

The Leasowes, 1992,
pamphlet, with
Nicholas Sloan.
536 A selection of sundials at Little Sparta:

time / item.
the four seasons / as
fore-and-afters.
dividing / the light /
i disclose / the hour.
h)our lady.
60 inscriptions
visitors of elements the passing of time, for instance that they

might have forgotten; the relevance or aptness of any allusion
marked the success or otherwise of that part of a design.3 Given the
necessarily limited spaces available for garden inscriptions unlike,
say, facades of buildings where the words could stretch across a
whole portico it is also conventional that garden inscriptions are
brief, even fragmentary. At Fleur de lAir, as the visitor descends
from the immediate garden into the olive groves, there is a grey
stone set into the ground on which is written sea-silver olives
(illus. 57); the concision of the reference, comparing the underside
of the olive leaf with the omnipresent Mediterranean Sea, is typical of the brevity allowed by a garden. Little Sparta, too, is full of
such abbreviated signals.
The inscription in the landscape is a physical manifestation of
the rhetorical mode called prosopopeia, the device by which a poet
or orator imagines something in the landscape speaking directly
to a privileged passer-by or visitor. A biblical example is Moses
57 sea-silver olives at
the top of the olive terraces at Fleur de lAir.
61
being told to put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place
whereon thou standest is holy ground (Exodus 3:5). Whether or
not Finlay was aware of the term and its signicance, he certainly
knew famous pictorial representations of it: in one of Nicolas
Poussins paintings entitled Et in Arcadia Ego (illus. 58 and 100),
some Arcadian shepherds discover and read an inscription on an
antique tomb, an inscription that announces to them that even
death has been in Arcadia.4 But there are also English literary and
pictorial versions of prosopopeia that help to recover the full force
of Finlays reliance upon this device.
Thomas Grays An Elegy in a Country Churchyard is one of the
most famous poems in the English language, and it tells of a poet
who pauses in a rural cemetery to read the tombstones and meditate upon those unknown folk who are buried there. The poem
contains a series of resonant phrases that have been cannibalized
as titles and pithy sayings ever since (Gone with the Wind, etc.),
and it was illustrated both by a friend of Grays, Richard Bentley,
who depicted a man leaning on his staff and reading a tomb inscription, and indirectly by Thomas Gainsborough, whose etching
shows a young peasant couple deciphering a headstone in what is
obviously a country churchyard (illus. 59). Poussin, Gray, Bentley
and Gainsborough all celebrate that auspicious if disturbing
moment when a passer-by happens upon a place that speaks to
him or her either explicitly through words written on a stone or
by a wordless epiphany, by the silent recognition of something
known but forgotten or repressed until the moment when it confronts the passer-by in a particular place.
Finlay knew, appreciated and appropriated the Poussin painting in several published versions. He also acknowledged the use of
inscriptions in eighteenth-century landscapes like The Leasowes
and Ermenonville to capture the passing attention of their visitors.
These precedents sustain and authorize his own reliance upon the
inscription that stops, detains and challenges or admonishes the
passer-by. man a passerby reads one inscription at Little Sparta
(illus. 50), and an adjacent bench elaborates (in itself a rather unusual occurrence in the garden) by offering the full quotation from
Alexandre Kojves work on Hegel to the effect that nothingness
. . . is what makes man a passerby in the spatial world. We are all,
of course, passers-by in the spaces of Finlays landscapes, and yet
it is our privilege to be addressed by innumerable ideas and reections. Some of these are things we know perfectly well; they are in
our consciousness already, yet we often need to be reminded of
62 inscriptions
58 Nicolas Poussin, Et in
Arcadia Ego, c. 1640, oil on
canvas. Louvre, Paris.
59 Maria Catherina
Prestel (after Gainsborough), Country Churchyard, 1790, aquatint, with
two gures reading a
gravestone.
them. Hence the device of prosopopeia. What is ambiguous, even

paradoxical, is that the landscapes may contain prompts that catch
our eye, and yet some visitors will have registered the ideas even
before they are formulated for them.
There is another, less arcane aspect of Finlays use of inscriptions. A stone at Little Sparta is inscribed with a quotation by
Saint-Just: The world has been empty since the Romans (illus.
60). Much is implied here, not least the weight that the French
Revolutionary gure of Saint-Just lends to this large nostalgia for
the Roman world. But its format more specically alludes to one
aspect of the antique culture its use of inscriptions.5 Finlay rst
63
60 A broken column at
Little Sparta, with a text
from Saint-Just: the
world has been empty
since the romans.
broached the idea in a huge installation at the Tate Gallery in 1985,6

when the same words were carved on what appeared to be a fragmented frieze or authentic temple inscription; except the language
was English, not the Latin of ancient Rome, and anyway we were
inside a modern art gallery. The translation of this particular statement to a garden context, however, involves further considerations.
Some British landscape might, just possibly, be a place where a
fragment of Roman inscription can be discovered,7 but the oddity
is still why it is not in Latin. Here at Little Sparta, the range and
careful assemblage of inscriptions throughout the garden allow
Finlay to ll the world emptied since the Romans, while also
alerting us to inevitable transformations of language.
Another inscription on a white marble urn at Little Sparta
announces
cogitatio
sub umbra
latinae
celata
(A thought beneath the shade of Latin [is] hidden). As Jessie
Sheeler has shown,8 the urn on which the words are inscribed
64 inscriptions
61 The Latin from

Virgils tenth Eclogue
and its English renderings
(Here are cool springs
and here soft meadows)
on Virgils Spring,
which marks the source
of water feeding the
ponds at Little Sparta.
suggests the death of Latin as the lingua franca of Europe, while

the word umbra has the secondary meaning of ghost. But the crucial word here, I think, is hidden. Finlay seems to want his visitors
to grasp the message only slowly, bit by bit. Sometimes he translates a Latin inscription (illus. 61), or he places Latin and English
versions of a text on adjacent benches, as is done at the top of the
Wild Garden. At other moments he lets the Latin percolate in our
linguistic memory after all, cogitatio is near enough to cogitation, umbra, to umbrageous or shady, latinae, to Latin and
(surely) he must have thought he could count upon a much more
resilient Scottish education that still included Latin! Meanwhile,
the beauty of the urn in its setting speaks for itself, silently and eloquently. And in that way the alert and sensitive visitor is conscious
of the inscription before it is fully discovered in the landscape.
Finlays remark cited at the head of this section that inscriptions in the imaginative mind of a visitor may be deemed to be in
the landscape anyway goes a long way to imply how he anticipated people would respond to his garden poems. Certainly, he gave
clues, prompts, images and words to trigger their memories or to
put ideas into their heads. Clearly, too, he did count on others
having as wide and as eclectic a knowledge as himself. All of which,
especially in the hands of his learned commentators, can be made
65
to assume a specic and often rich signicance. Yet in practice and

on the ground, hints and prompts survive in a much more open
eld of meaning, to which visitors bring their own repertoire of
ideas and associations. Nonetheless, the Finlay garden does not
cater to a free-for-all process of association, for it is initiated by
triggers and clues that appear to be precise in their sources and references even if we cannot immediately put our nger on them. We
can perhaps see this somewhat paradoxical garden process at work
if we look more closely at some elements of Finlays last garden
creation, Fleur de lAir.
Compared with Little Sparta, Fleur de lAir is roughly four times
as large and contains only a quarter the number of Finlay insertions. One consequence is that the visitor has much more space and
time to ponder their meanings and associations: some conveyed
by inscriptions working alone, a few by inscribed sculpture or
other structures. The very rst that we meet just after the entry is
easy enough a circle of nine plinths, each of which is inscribed
with the name of a Muse and supports a female torso; these are
identical, and each turns her head towards the centre, angled
downwards as if they were reading the disk in their midst where is
written happy the man who is loved by the muses (illus. 62).
There is a long tradition of representing the nine Muses in gardens,
sometimes led by the gure of Apollo (though he is absent at this
point in Provence9), for it is as a result of all of the Muses creative
resources that ne gardens are established and enjoyed. The appearance of the Muses here at the entrance alerts us to our likely
encounter with a similar artistic collaboration at Fleur de lAir. But
their somewhat unusual shape and posture they are copies of
a Roman Hellenizing statue of Psyche or Aphrodite in a Naples
museum may remind visitors that the classical past has always
to be revised and reshaped for present consumption.
Many inscriptions at Fleur de lAir, properly and inevitably,
concern its genius loci. Even when Finlay reuses an idea, either its
re-location in Provence transforms its relevance or it undergoes
amendment itself: the Woodland Flute plinth, rst proposed for
the Monteviot Project in Lothian, continues to list northern species
that take on a new life in Provence (almond, lemon, myrtle); the
repertoire of different timbers with their implications for boatbuilding now includes g and olive (illus. 63); ten of the 68 steps
that lead from the terrace by the house down into the olive groves
are carved with the names of British World War ii Flower class
convoy escort ships, corvettes, that Finlay had celebrated at Little
66 inscriptions
Sparta, but here most of the owers are to be found growing in

southern France.
The nostalgia of northern folk for a warm and myth-freighted
south is a major theme of this garden. It imbues Finlays own
imaginative response, even as he deliberately invokes famous, likeminded predecessors. Among these, Goethe gures prominently.
A tree-plaque near the house cites Goethes poem about scarcely
a breeze in every treetop; this is then answered by another, quoting the English mystic Henry Vaughan on divine light and worldly
shade; between them the pair encourages our attention to the particular landscape around us. By the house itself Goethe speaks
again, twice: rst (illus. 64) in the famous words of Mignon, inscribed on the square plinth of the white stone vase lled with
carved lemons, kennst du das land wo die zitronen bluhn
(Do you know the land where lemons bloom?), and again (illus.
65) of myrtle and laurel, die myrte still und hoch der lorbeer steht (Still the myrtle, and the laurel high). This second
line is also carved on a plain white urn, except now the shrubs so
named on its base are actually growing immediately behind it.
Giloniss elaborate gloss on the signicance of this item notes the
French name is laurier dApollon,10 so we may also surely recognize
the oblique homage to Finlays favourite deity, Apollo, now in his
creative capacity of inspiring poets whose successes have been
crowned with laurel, and therefore was traditionally associated
67
62 The circle of the

Muses at Fleur de lAir,
Provence (in December
2003.
63 A wooden seat at Fleur

de lAir inscribed with
smooth-barked tree
species.
64 A vase on the terrace
near the house at Fleur de
lAir, with an inscription
from Goethe (kennst du
das land wo die zitronen bluhn).
65 Fleur de lAir.
A second vase with a
Goethe inscription, about
myrtle and laurel (die
myrte still und hoch
der lorbeer steht).
68 inscriptions
with the Muses as their leader. But again, as at the entry to the
property, his presence is only implied.
Beyond a northern yearning for the south, Fleur de lAirs inscriptions also remind us of our being now in France references
to Michelet (illus. 69) and to Pascal as well as poets who actually
lived and wrote here. Petrarch directly, others obliquely, are called
upon to speak and direct our attention upon the ambient landscape. Inscribed beehives may recall the fourth book of Virgils
Georgics, as does the litany of natural elements written on the blocks
of stone in the Grove of Eurydice (illus. 66 and 67). A tree-plaque
with the names of pyramus / thisbe fastened to a mulberry tree is
a direct Ovidian (not Shakespearean) reference, as are, though now
indirectly via the language of Alexander Pope, the incantations of
Eurydice. These constitute one of the major insertions into the
olive groves of Fleur de lAir and reverberate with a celebration,
elegiac as it is also triumphant a series of six stones each inscribed
as follows:
66 A distant view of the

Eurydice stones at Fleur
de lAir, with attendant
cypresses.
67 One of the Eurydice

stones, inscribed
eurydice the clouds /
eurydice the oaks).
69
eurydice the woods

eurydice the floods eurydice the snows
eurydice the mountain-tops eurydice the stars
eurydice the groves eurydice the swifts
eurydice the nightingales eurydice the clouds
eurydice the oaks eurydice the rocks.
The phrases are suggested by Popes Ode for Musick upon St
Cecilias Day, which opens with an invitation to the Muses
Descent ye Nine. But the name of Eurydice, rst announced once
and then redoubled on the succeeding rocks, resounds along the
terrace, as it did when Orpheus bewailed her loss and sang her
name throughout the echoing landscape.
Nearby, the eye is led towards a small tempietto (illus. 68), where
a shiny gold inscription on its frieze reads lombra medita
sulla luce / shadows muse on light. Again, this is entirely
apt for Provence, where even in the winter months (which is when
I saw it) the play between light and shade is of the essence. But the
vaguely Neoclassical landscape created by the siting of this little
temple and its adjacency to a verbal recollection of the famous
mythical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice are also striking and appropriate. Classical painters whom Finlay admires and cites at
Little Sparta did in fact depict such mythical scenes Poussin even
produced a beautiful painting (now in the Louvre) of Eurydice
stung on her heel by a serpent in a landscape amidst temples and
tombs to suggest her own imminent death from the bite.11 In
68 The tempietto against

the hillside at Fleur de
lAir.
70 inscriptions
Provence, we have a better chance perhaps than in Scotland to see

Poussin and hear Lorrain.
There are, as usual, many associations at play in this Finlay
work, and knowing that we are in a Finlay garden that functions
in special ways and invites a certain behaviour will go a long way
to stir our imaginations even before we have elucidated their more
specic and recondite meanings. Yet their immediate effect within
the Provenal territory is to sharpen our senses to receive the landscape in all of its fullness, its olives and stone terracing (illus. 69
and 70), its precious water collected in a basin (illus. 87), its traditional but now ruined farm building. This is also the case with the
direct invocation of Petrarch, a poet who lived and worked in
Provence, where he enjoyed two gardens dedicated respectively to
69 The line of stones

with the French Revolutionary quotation from
Michelet at Fleur de lAir.
70 View down the slope

through the olive terraces
at Fleur de lAir; the Eurydice stones can be seen by
the cypresses, the top of
the tempietto to their left.
71
Bacchus and Apollo.12 But Petrarchs already generalized language

is further abstracted at Fleur de lAir to offer a composite
Provence of the mind, and of the senses13 more in keeping with
this new garden than making any specic reference to Petrarchs
actual residence besides the River Sorgue at La Fontaine de Vaucluse:
clear, cool, sweet, running waters. cxxvi petrarca
the woods, the rocks, the fields, rivers and hills.
cxlii petrarca
the aura, fragrance, coolness and the shade.
cccxxvii petrarca
71 One of the Petrarch

stelae at Fleur de lAir
(the aura, fragrance,
coolness and the
shade. cccxxvii
petrarca).
The very format of presenting the inscription of these translations

of Petrarchs lines to be read on three upright stelae (illus. 71)
rather than embedded in the ground or hung upon trees works
to abstract them from their immediate surroundings deep in the
woods towards the bottom of the site, as we descend further into its
less cultivated wilderness. Edeline observes that visitors to Finlays
gardens need to have a taste for the abstract, for generalizations.14
Other inscriptions, eclectic and sometimes exceedingly gnomic
even with the availability of a learned gloss, bring into the
Provenal landscape other classical associations: there are Plautus
(encouraging the behaviour of wild boar), Sappho (whom Plato
considered the tenth Muse15), an obscure fourth-century Syrian
72 inscriptions
bishop called Nemisius, the anonymous poet of the Greek Anthology, Heraclitus and Homer. This last, whom we encounter at the
very end of our progress down the hillside, is crucial for giving
fresh resonance to Finlays appetite for the sea. On a huge oar
wrapped around with a net, cast in bronze, we read hom.od.xi
(illus. 72 and 73). This is a reference to Odysseus wanderings and
to the prophecy of Tiresias that he may meet people who do not
know the sea and will be puzzled by the huge oar he carries, in
which case he must make handsome sacrice to lordly Poseidon.
We are here nearer to the mare nostrum, the Mediterranean, than
in any other Finlay site (except perhaps the Parco di Celle near
72, 73 The Homeric oar

at Fleur de lAir, and a
detail of its inscription
(hom. od. xi).
73
746 Three of the shing-vessel registration

plaques set into an
olive-terrace wall at
Fleur de lAir.
inconnu . . .
reve dete . . .
loiseau . . .
Pistoia), but it is still sufciently distant for homage to be paid to

the oceans god. And so, as we return uphill towards the house,
well take note once again but more clearly of the signicance of
names and registration numbers of French shing boats: laudacieux, or file au vent (illus. 746).
74 inscriptions
7 Spaces full of doubt

a model of order, even if set in a space which is full of doubt
As a walk through Fleur de lAir may suggest, Finlay gardens and

landscape are not entirely easy places; fascinating, yes, intriguing
too in their hints of meanings beyond our immediate comprehension, but not places of immediate certainty or simplicity. They
can be solid places, as Finlay has argued, because we feel there the
sensuous presence of earth, air, sun and water, but still occasionally unnerving. In this affect, the inscription plays a crucial role: it
transxes us, even if it does not x or nail down a particular signicance. It stops us in our tracks, and says something to us. And
when, as at Little Sparta, we are assailed by many more of them in
a more restricted space than at Fleur de lAir or Stockwood Park,
their effect may be unsettling. But this is also something that Finlay
has intimated as a likely outcome of garden experience. Not just
that a garden may be an attack (not a complacent retreat), but that
the insertion into a garden of elements of concrete poetry implies
some instability. In a much cited letter written in September 1963
to the French poet Pierre Garnier, Finlay dened the concrete
poem as a model of order, even if set in a space which is full of
doubt.1 If the poem now inserted into a garden continues to be a
model of order, having its own logical or imaginative order and
providing a form of orientation, then by extension it still exists or
needs to exist in a space full of doubt, which will be the garden.
This is surely correct: even the best-designed landscape or garden
is by no means a place of certainty, stability and calm predictability,
as we often sentimentally imagine it to be. Indeed, it may often be a
space full of doubt, which, however, we do not necessarily take to
be a reproach. There is an astonishing leitmotif of unease, sub-text,
innuendo and scepticism in much literature about gardens,2 so it is
no surprise that actual gardens also sometimes discomfort us in their
own way. The play of shifting light in a garden, the changes of focus
as the hours pass, and its growth over long periods of time and
our own discoveries of how to experience it, all contribute to the
instability of a garden. Finlay himself is often insistent that our
habitually sentimental views of gardens as benign, unproblematical
75
77 The Flock stones and

ha-ha at Stockwood Park,
Luton.
and harmless must be challenged: hence The lawn is the gardens

downfall, or Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees.3 So much so, in effect, that what
seem models of order, the orientation of the visitor by word, fragment, excerpt or quotation, can themselves be called into question
by their location within gardens. This is partly why it is essential
to try and experience Finlays gardens as gardens, rather than as
places where he has placed examples of his other poetry that can be
subject to condent exegesis as if they were on the printed page.
This mixture of doubt and certainty is crucial, as is the dialogue
in which we see them engaged. The inscriptions at Fleur de lAir
do not always allow us to settle comfortably into green thoughts
amidst green shades. Little Sparta is full of reminders of the violence of nature, including human nature, of the destructions of
wartime and the cruelty of the sea. Apollo has his music and his
muses, but just in case we assume these are always innocent and
consolatory, he also has his missiles (illus. 78). He is the pursuer
and would-be ravisher of Daphne, and his golden, but decapitated head is emblazoned with terrorist (illus. 79) whatever we
make of it, something is very nasty in the shrubbery. We associate
decapitated heads with the guillotine of the French Revolution
(the inscription on the golden head is in French), and the excesses
76 spaces full of doubt
78 The Temple of Apollo

across the Temple Pool,
Little Sparta.
79 In the Wild Garden,

Little Sparta: the golden
head of Apollon Terroriste,
the tree plaque quoting
Jean-Baptiste Louvet
in praise of solitary
woodland, and (behind)
silver cloud, an island
monument inscribed
with nautical references.
77
and violence of that event are for Finlay as unavoidable as are its
achievements.
Little Sparta insists more than most of Finlays gardens on the
uneasy world within them. Stockwood Park is disconcerting in
milder fashion, with the gently subversive substitution of blocks
of stone for grazing sheep, and its gnomic inscriptions. The grove
at the Krller-Mller Museum (illus. 145) features names, the import of which may be doubtful. Such sibylline leavings are not, at
least in the rst instance, conducive to certainty and security. Fleur
de lAir, as we have seen, lures one into a world where we need to
attune ourselves to others nostalgia for a classical and southern
past; but it also contains both the grove of Eurydice, where the
music of Orpheus cannot drown out the loss of his beloved to a
fatal serpents bite, and a wilderness where the wild boar can
wallow in mud and scratch its itchy skin before it is hunted.
Doubt and scepticism are near allied, and scepticism was a good
neo-classical virtue among many thinkers and philosophers. So it
can be no surprise that it appealed to Finlay (Audacity has been
put to fewer equivocal uses than scepticism4) and that it occupies
a central role in Finlays dedication to the neo-classical (a theme
to be taken up more fully later). Scepticism has its spatial equivalents in landscape design, which saw an extraordinary development during the longue dure of the European Enlightenment:
surprises, hidden then revealed conditions, paths not taken, the
fake structure or folly, the unexpected ha-ha, and even the maze,
labyrinth and wilderness became conspicuous resources for the
landscape designer. Furthermore, landscape is, as we are frequently
reminded (and Finlay in his battle with Strathclyde Region knew
only too well), a contested domain contested in innumerable
ways: by both cultures and different concepts of nature, by the
different constituencies that design such spaces and nally by all
those who have recourse to and use them. Gardens, for all our
sentimental regard, are not necessarily secure places. They are constantly changing by the hour, by the season, year after year. They
establish an ambiguous zone of half-art, half-nature, which Finlay
explores very specically in the different treatments of the branches
and wooden planks of his pergola, Inter Artes et Naturam, now in
the English Parkland of Little Sparta (illus. 140), but rst shown,
less effectively, in the interior of the Victoria Miro Gallery in
London in 1988.5
By denition, too, gardens are different, set apart, from more
workaday surroundings; they often have distinct thresholds, the
78
spaces full of doubt
80 Gateway into the Front

Garden at Little Sparta:
(a cottage . a field . a
plough, a quotation from
Saint-Just).
crossing of which exhorts us to pay special attention the

gateposts at Fleur de lAir are crowned with both the traditional
welcoming pineapple and the hand grenade (the rst is a traditional emblem of greeting offering your prized fruit to guests
and the grenade was dubbed a pineapple by British soldiers). And
within its large enclosure, subsidiary thresholds at Little Sparta
maintain an insistent, liminal challenge: from the gates and cattle
grid along the stony track that leads to it, the gateway into the
Front and Roman Gardens, to the other gateposts and lattices, the
stiles and footbridges, the visitor has always to navigate through
and across boundaries, where inscriptions beneath the feet slow
progress (illus. 45, 46, 80, 81, 90). If gardens are at all extensive, they
also offer various, bafing routes by which we could visit them,
though the provision in many cases of a plan offers the illusion
that we have mastered that uncertainty. On the other hand, their
spaces can be exciting, even exotic, and perhaps challenging, and
we are prepared to entertain the ambiguities and doubtful elements in return for the special experiences that they allow us.
Finlays sites, more than most, destabilize those who hope to
nd in them a mindless green world of relaxation and retreat. It
is, then, no accident that he thinks of them as attacks rather than
retreats and that this adversarial mood is contrived by his insertions of items that we do not expect to nd in gardens: plinths
79
81 The gate piers in the

Wild Garden, Little
Sparta, with grenades
(nicknamed pineapples)
in place of nials.
and column bases around trees; dictionary redenitions (illus.

83) like allotment n. a garden of Epicurus, or flautist n. a
stone-carver; verbal puns (wave sheaf for wheatsheaf); the conning tower of a nuclear submarine; endless homage, not just to
the sea and its shing craft, but to warships and the warfare that
has destroyed them; miniaturized aircraft carriers appear innocuously as bird-tables. Virgils Eighth Eclogue that apostrophizes the
pastoral ute is now imaged by a machine gun (illus. 84) and the
plaques date (4 February 1983) memorializes the First Battle of
Little Sparta, when Finlay and his cohorts needed to defend this
enclave against the politico-bureaucratic attack of the Strathclyde
Region in an attempt to seize works from the Garden Temple
(repulsed on that occasion, but lost in a subsequent raid the
following month).
But we cannot leave gardens there. Their doubtfulness is a deliberate creation, awakening in us scepticisms about our current
beliefs and behaviours, then alerting us to fresh possibilities of
thought and action. A garden is a place of change, of process, of
metamorphosis. As such it sends its visitors back into the world as
somehow different persons: reorientated, refreshed, rejuvenated.
So with retrospection, time spent in gardens is anything but doubtful. Along with many experiences of other arts music, painting,
literature or architecture it offers new certainties or at least new
perspectives. In that way the whole garden, not just its incidental
inscriptions or formal insertions, becomes a model of order within
daily spaces full of doubt. This condence in the making and experience of gardens underlies, I suggest, Finlays creative regard for
them. From each of his gardens Little Sparta, Fleur de lAir,
Stockwood Park, the Max Planck grounds or the grove at the
Krller-Mller we inevitably return to spaces less coherent, less
charged, less visionary, less sacred than where we have been. That
is one reason they are attacks and not retreats. That is also why we
may even nd that we have their inscriptions in our consciousness
long after we have left.
80 spaces full of doubt
Two redenitions at
Little Sparta:
82 stile, n. an escalation
of the footpath.
83 allotment n.
a garden of Epicurus
(see also p. 134).
84 Memorial to the First

Battle of Little Sparta, on
the track leading up to the
garden.
81
8 . . . the hideous process of secularization

Embark on a garden with a vision . . .
A major event in Finlays embattled rejection of much modern culture was the publication in 1986 of the National Trusts gazetteer,
Follies: A Guide. It is not a work that inspires much enthusiasm or
any condence that its two authors (Gwyn Headley and Wim
Meulenkamp) understood or could discriminate among the extraordinary range of structures that can be called follies.1 Their text
on Little Sparta was typical: although there is an Apollo Temple,
a broken column or two and an avalanche of poetic mottoes and
inscriptions, the insistent namedropping of pastoral painters and
garden theorists tends to get on ones nerves.2 Yet Finlays anger was
not directed so much at that belittling and uncomprehending description, but at what he considered the authors total disregard of
the traditions of garden insertions in general and in particular how
such insertions spoke to visitors about the meaning of a place; in
short, the authors ignorance about the idea of genius loci. He wrote
to me at the time to protest the hideous process of secularization
perpetrated by the National Trust book. To another correspondent
he lamented that the Trust was supposed to conserve traditions,
but had both mocked and degraded follies and their makers. It is
a perfect (sublimlely [sic] imperfect) example of secularization.3
This episode highlights a particularly strong concern of Finlays
that a garden achieve sublimity and some sense of the sacred. Both
of these need some elucidation in the light of conventional attitudes towards gardens and landscape architecture. Given that
the secular is the antimony of the sacred, Finlays refusal of the
rst implies a search for the second, and since the sacred has
often implied a strong measure of sublime experience, the two
are effectively linked.
Finlays notion of the sacred, or what alternatively he would call
piety,4 does not involve, it should be clear, any specically religious or sectarian beliefs. Rather, it is the recognition of something
that has its immaterial existence beyond the phenomena of the
quotidian world. The sacred is what we cannot materialize, the
noumena that we choose to infer from tangible things that are by
82
themselves incomplete or empty of meaning. In Little Sparta is a

stone representation of Pans pipes or syrinx, an antique musical
instrument; inscribed on this is the injunction when the wind
blows venerate the sound (illus. 85). This telling piece embodies in miniature Finlays search for both the sacred and the
sublime. Like so many of his injunctions or moments of proposopeia, it initiates the visitor into a series of recognitions. First,
there is just the large-scale sculpture of a musical instrument lying
on a plinth, in itself somewhat unexpected in a garden; then they
are presumably identied as the pipes of Pan, and so get connected
to an Arcadian world already announced in other ways throughout the garden. Afterwards, perhaps the inscription is pondered,
and indeed visitors may suddenly register that indeed the wind is
blowing. Yet venerate invites them beyond local weather conditions to an intuition of the pipes actually being played by Pan, the
woodland ute of mythic time, and of the frisson of terror and
pleasure that the sounds of the wild goat-god could induce. There
is a measure of awe simply in making some or all of these connections, in deriving some unexpected understanding from the
physical object beside the path. The unseen and the seen coalesce.
Fragments in a Finlay garden, it has already been argued, are like
icebergs, the tips of a world that we cannot see but must assume to
be there, fractions of a larger and mysterious world under the surface. Finlays many waves in whatever language function in this
way, as scraps of a larger ocean, as tokens of the sea that is absent
from all of his sites, yet almost obsessively remembered in each of
83
85 A syrinx or pan pipes

at Little Sparta, inscribed
when the wind blows
venerate the sound.
them (illus. 6, 10, 32, 33). The ocean, with unseen depths and an
innite horizon, has always been associated with a sublime experience par excellence. But the words and images in his gardens that
direct our imaginations towards the ocean are already for Finlay
an essential adjunct of the sacred: The inscription seems out of
place in the modern garden. It jars on our secularism by suggesting the hierarchies of the word. This aphorism, of course, addresses
his conviction that the modern world has forfeited its ability to
be reverent, to nd sublimity or awe in, for instance, the forces of
nature, in short to be attuned to what may be called the sacred.
The mystery of the natural world and the way those mysteries
have been mythologized appealed deeply to Finlay. And his gardens
are ways of sharing or communicating those extraordinary human
connections with processes beyond the lifespan and sometimes
even the comprehension of a normal person (Man the Passer-by).
He has basically two modes of conveying this understanding: one
is by abstracting natural elements; the other (paradoxically) is its
opposite, by concretizing natural experience.
The abstraction works through the artistic tools at Finlays disposal, particularly the abstraction that comes easily through literary
expressions. Most language is inevitably abstract, at one remove
from whatever it describes or refers to, but some language is more
abstract than others. Petrarchs presence at Fleur de lAir is signalled
by three inscriptions (illus. 71) that draw from his writings essential elements of nature waters, woods, rocks, elds, hills, fragrance,
86 vnda at Little
Sparta.
coolness and shade. Petrarch was himself generalizing personal

experiences in his poetry, but in the garden in Provence, further
abstracted by Finlay, translations of his words seem to move even
further from actuality. They leave it up to the gardens visitors to
connect the poets words with the tangible, palpable world all
around them. Even when there is a pool of water, Finlay can pull
out something of its abstract quality by an inscription (illus. 87).
The series of Eurydice inscriptions at Fleur de lAir also make play
with the generalized litany of woods, oods, snows, mountains,
groves and oaks (illus. 67).
A contrary strategy makes the abstract ideas we habitually rely
on come powerfully alive. We live by portable notions and familiar tags like earth, air, re and water; we take tree species for
granted (or simply dont distinguish between them), or we dont
really consider the true meaning of words. Finlay takes such unreective ideas and by one means or another forces us to confront
both things themselves and their true meanings and implications.
Within a grove of maples and hornbeams a stele-like tablet reads
bring back the birch (illus. 88), and once we put aside issues of
corporal punishment we realize that it is the moorland birch tree
that is missing here; so we start to discriminate among the trees
around us. The redenition of crucial terms in landscape architecture or gardening returns us sharply to exactly what it is we are
saying when we use terms like ripple or arch. At Little Sparta, one
of a series of stepping stones across the Middle Pond is inscribed
85
87 Inscription by
the irrigation basin at
Fleur de lAir: water
has being cool as
its gift nemesianus.
ripple n. a fold. a fluting of the liquid element (illus.

89); or on an arched stone bridge in the English Parkland is written
arch n. an architectural term a material curve sustained by gravity as rapture by grief (illus. 90). This last,
intricately calculated redenition leads us, in fact, back and forth
between abstractions and things: from a proper recognition of the
necessary skills of engineering to human passions, which are in
turn themselves reied in the stone arch before us.
The sacred is then a complex aspect of Finlays garden art. He
insists endlessly but often obliquely upon it. But when we do respond to his invitations to move beyond mere phenomena to the
noumenous possibilities that lurk (or can be made to lurk) behind
them, we enter realms that are not simply secular. And in his
recognition that gardens may require or can elicit a spiritual experience Finlay is not entirely alone. He may be compared to one
other luminary of the late eighteenth century, whom once more
(like Sterne) he does not appear to have considered. William Blake
famously recounted a modern loss of spiritual faith in his Marriage
of Heaven and Hell: its eleventh plate explains the origins of what
today we still term the genius loci. He recalls how the enlarged &
numerous senses of ancient poets animated everything in the
world around them, placing every city and county under its mental deity, until modern rationalism and religion abstracted and
systemized this ancient responsiveness to place. Finlay would seem
to concur, for what he derides as secularism plays the same role in
emptying the natural world of any mystery and the phrase genius
loci of any signicance. But despite Blakes pessimism, the idea of
and even belief in genius loci has not entirely succumbed to rationalist or Gradgrindian positivism. The modern philosopher and
landscape critic Andr Roger may well insist that En lui-meme, le
gnie du lieu nexiste pas (in itself, the genius of place doesnt
exist), but he sneaks it back in as merely a cultural construction,
jettisoning any supernaturalism and in the process making fun of
a writer like Maurice Barrs, who in his La Colline inspire of 1912
wrote of des lieux o soufe lesprit . . . qui tirent lme de sa lthargie, des lieux envelopps, baigns de mystre, lus de toute
ternit pour tre le sige de lmotion religieuse (places where
the spirit breathes . . . that pulls the soul out of its lethargy, places
enveloped, bathed in mystery, elected for all eternity as seats of religious emotion).5 But anyone who recalls E. M. Forsters short story
The Road From Colonus will surely understand what Barrs, for
all his incantatory prose, was getting at: that places do reach out
88 The setting of bring

back the birch in the
Front Garden at Little
Sparta.
Redenition at
Little Sparta:
89 ripple, n. a fold, a
fluting of the liquid
element.
and seize one with an emotion that is Blake and Finlay would
happily acknowledge spiritual without being religious. And
Barthes, citing Hegel, too, invoked this same understanding of
noumena in explaining how the ancient Greek . . . demanded the
meaning of springs, mountains, forests, storms; without knowing
what all these objects said to him one by one, he perceived in the
order of the vegetable world and of the cosmos an immense frisson of meaning, to which he gave the name of a god, Pan.6 Finlays
understanding of both sacred mystery and sublime frisson and his
attempts to instil these ideas and emotions in others also rely,
though by no means exclusively, upon the goat-god of Arcady.
87
90 An arched stone
bridge, one of several in
the English Parkland at
Little Sparta. The inscription reads arch, n. an
architectural term, a
material curve sustained by gravity as
rapture by grief.
9 Mare nostrum
Sempre si fa il mare maggiore
tintoretto
On a tree in Little Sparta hangs a plaque inscribed with two Latin

words, mare nostrum (illus. 91). This is what the Romans called
the Mediterranean: our sea. And it announces Finlays passionate
dedication to the sea, even in land-locked terrain like Little
Sparta, Fleur de lAir or the Max Planck Institut at Stuttgart. But
why, especially in gardens so far inland, do the sea and its ships
and boats play such a dominant and visible role?
The sea had been an unavoidable and unmistakable presence
in Finlays life long before Little Sparta. Born in the Bahamas, his
father a smuggler of bootleg liquor into the United States, he had
lived for a while in Orkney. Ponds were among the rst elements
introduced into the moorland slopes at Dunsyre, and some of the
most touching images of Stonypath (as it was then called) were of
the small boats Finlay made for Alec and of his son at the helm in
one of them. Boats are still drawn up on their strands (illus. 9 and
92). Yet the seas importance goes beyond the personal; biography
does not explain why its tides ow and ebb through many of Finlays gardens, though it may certainly account for his preliminary
fascination. As is the gardener, so is the garden, was a seventeenthcentury saying,1 but even when we recognize that gardeners make
gardens after their own image, the garden itself must eventually
come to speak for itself.
We might start with the Latinity of Mare Nostrum, which
points to Finlays investment in reworking the classical tradition.
But the Mediterranean is also the sea around which the fabulous
places of pastoral and Arcady were gathered, places peopled by
Apollo, Pan and the Sibyl. So he must have found a particular resonance when called to make the garden in Provence, for in no
other site was he as close to the Mediterranean. Yet it is above all
at Little Sparta that the sea is encountered (on a recent visit two
women in complete bewilderment asked me why there were so
many references to the sea there). There are the ponds with boats
that sail on them; beside one pond the conning tower of a submarine (Nuclear Sail, illus. 93) thrusts through the turf, as it might
88
91 Tree plaque at Little

Sparta: mare nostrum.
92 Boats drawn up on
shore of the Lochan, Little
Sparta.
93 Nuclear Sail,
Little Sparta.
89
through Arctic ice; paths are inscribed with the different types of
boats (illus. 7); there is the line of brick plinths with bronze cutout silhouettes and names of naval corvettes (illus. 94); there are the
several reiterations of vnda or wave; there are aircraft carriers
metamorphosed into bird-tables (illus. 95). But inscriptions also
play a part in recalling the sea for visitors to Little Sparta, and they
take many forms, including variations on the familiar vnda.
There is the signpost pointing to dieppe. Beehives are inscribed
with shing-boat names and registration numbers. There is the
bench inscribed with oak bark boat, where the middle term
mediates between the boat and the wood from which it could be
made. Similarly three stelae (illus. 25) pursue the refrain of
bark & leaf
boat & bark
leaf & boat
And again, this time on a three-sided bench around a tree at the
edge of the enclosed garden and looking towards agricultural land:
the seas waves | the waves sheaves | the seas naves
And in the English Parkland is a wooden bridge that crosses the
stream owing down from Lochan Eck, and on it is the inscription that connects (as bridges also do) the ow of water beneath
with certain nautical items:
lines of foam
strings of foam
strands of foam
ropes of foam
lacings of foam
These and many more allusions to the sea work somewhat paradoxically: they recall the sea for visitors in this land-locked garden,
while at the same time they emphasize that it is ultimately absent
from these gardens. One result is that it pushes the whole idea and
association of the ocean back into the individuals imagination.
The painter Tintoretto famously described his professional challenge as an artist with a typically Venetian metaphor sempre si
fa il mare maggiore (always the sea gets bigger). For Finlay, too,
the sea is a neap tide advancing through his landscapes and into
90 mare nostrum
94 The brick plinths and

the corvettes they
celebrate, Camouaged
Flowers, at Little Sparta.
95 An aircraft-carrier
bird-table beside the
Temple Pool, Little Sparta.
91
96 The much-weathered
wooden stele carved with
evening will come . . .
at Little Sparta.
our consciousness; one of the boats on the Lochan is named Never

Enough. At Stuttgart the hic jacet plaque rises from the small
pond (illus. 34), an extract of some much larger ocean, but also
perhaps reminding us that one of the elements studied by physicists at the Max Planck Institut must be the motion and length of
waves. The hic jacet at Little Sparta (illus. 35) also alerts one,
even more insistently, to the absence of the sea and, at the same
time, to its incremental presence throughout the garden. But there
is also an elegiac note sounded by the hic jacet and its gravestone format, a sadness that the sea is distant and can only be
miniaturized here.
But the sea itself serves Finlay in another capacity. It is nothing
if not cruel, destructive, and the warships that patrol it are both
vessels of destruction and themselves often destroyed in combat.
So the sea fulls yet another agenda in Finlays garden poetry by
reminding us that nature is violent and savage. Throughout Finlays allusions to the sea and to those that sail on her sound the notes
of loss and disaster, like the torpedoed corvettes or the shing boats
that, recalled only by their registrations, are ghostly presences
were they lost or are they still aoat? One of the most poignant of
Finlays gestures towards both sea and loss was rst formulated in
a poster poem and then carved and slightly re-lineated on a
wooden sundial and installed at Little Sparta, where it is now much
weathered (illus. 96). It faces to the west, and reads:
evening
will
come
they will
sew the
blue sail
As Stephen Scobie has demonstrated, these words taken from a
print enlarge their meaning hugely when they are read in situ.2 The
sundial is a conventional garden item, but here it is also shaped
like a sail. By facing west, it enacts its own pronouncement, but
enlarges the oceanic reference. Yet it is also shaped like a gravestone: the faintly elegiac suggestion of sewing a shroud at days
end, that the weathered wood also acknowledges, extends the maritime reference: life is a voyage wherever you sail it.
A garden has traditionally been thought of as a complete collection, a fullness, a recovery of the plenitude of Eden. For that to
92
mare nostrum
be adequately realized, gardens must have at least water, if not

representations of the sea. Of the four elements, water is the last
after earth, air and re, and so it must play its part, with time and
tide, in garden art (illus. 23). And indeed, marine imagery was . . .
expected in large gardens,3 so why not in small? The gure of
Neptune was recommended in the early eighteenth century by
Stephen Switzer to possess the Centre of the great body of water
in a garden, and while Finlay himself has never used that particular iconography, the sea-gods presence is endlessly intimated. In
one of Finlays careful references to eighteenth-century landscape
architecture, he calls the gardens of Stourhead a stand of concepts,
an arsenal of ideas (illus. 101). In contrast to some of the rather
silly and reductive ideas about Stourhead advanced by one of the
early writers on English garden history,4 Finlay himself seems to
have appreciated the scope of its example, however much its scale
and formal achievements eclipsed what he himself could afford.
And at Stourhead the lake around which the itinerary of the garden visit circles calls up many associations with the sea, indeed
with the Mare Nostrum of the Romans in Virgils Aeneid. Contemporary visitors to Stourhead made much of its Ocean, even its
representations of river-gods, and a modern commentator notes
the eighteenth centurys recognition that the protected waters of
lakes like that at Stourhead were associated, by contrast, with the
storms of public immorality and that Stourheads creator, Henry
Hoare, was himself a connoisseur of storm paintings. Finlay has
different modes of highlighting public immorality and the artists
determined opposition to them, but his allusions to the sea and its
destructive element considerably augment the imaginative possibilities of bringing the sea into his gardens. Ocean storms may not
need actually to exist in gardens, if they are in the consciousness
of those who visit them.
93
10 Et in Arcadia Ego
aye, aye, death is even in Arcadia
george iii
Arcady, along with its inhabitants, is everywhere in Finlays imagination, and so, inevitably, much also in his gardens. What seems
at rst sight just an abandoned and shattered column lying in the
English Parkland offers to dene it arcadia n. a kingdom in
spartas neighbourhood (illus. 97). This invites those who
stumble upon it to recognize that being in the world (or kingdom)
of Little Sparta they are necessarily in the vicinity of Arcadia.
An early celebration by Finlay of Arcady in the 1960s explored
its potential simply in words: the title, arcady, and then the
letters of the alphabet, implying that out of the basic tool kit of
language we can remake, as Finlay put it, The elds and forests,
mosses and springs of an ancient pastoral landscape.1 A decade
later, the tone is darker, and graphic images of landscape now enter
the equation: it is a lithographed poster in emblematic format,
showing an army tank moving through an idyllic grove, with a
bright blue sky behind, and a owery mead below; among the
owers are the words Of Famous Arcady Ye Are, and the name of
John Milton (illus. 98). The archaism of the Miltonic phrase draws
out and makes more palpable the bitterness of the emblematic
conjunction of tank and pretty landscape. Soon, the depicted and
abstracted landscape of that poster nds its representation in real
gardens, along with real toads, or at least an outsized tortoise on
whose shell is written in German gothic script Panzer [or tank]
Leader (illus. 99).
In 1977 Finlay, along with Gary Hincks and Stephen Bann, produced their Footnotes to an Essay, visual and verbal commentaries upon Erwin Panofskys famous essay, Et in Arcadia Ego:
Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition.2 Panofsky had addressed a
group of paintings, two by Nicolas Poussin from circa 1630 and the
early 1640s, and a third, from between 1621 and 1623, by Giovanni
Francesco Guercino; all three show a group of shepherds in a beautiful landscape where they have just discovered a tomb on which
is carved the Latin, et in arcadia ego (illus. 100), and, in Guercinos case, also a prominently displayed skull. While the earlier
94
97 A close-up of the
arcadia n. a kingdom
in spartas neighbourhood column.
98 Of Famous Arcady Ye
Are, 1977, poster with
Michael Harvey.
95
99 Tortoise as Panzer
Leader in the Front
painting, less subtle or recondite than the two by Poussin, seems

with its inscription to state simply that the buried person was one
who had lived in Arcadia, Poussin as Panofsky revealed asks us
to interpret it as the admonition that Even in Arcady, I, too, Death,
hold sway, that, if you will, the most perfect of places, Arcady,
harbours destruction, maybe even its own destruction.
In their Footnotes Finlay and his collaborators took these three
seventeenth-century paintings, along with two others by Cipriani
and Kolbe, and redrew them, before contrasting each of them with
a second reimagined version of the redrawn original, each of the
two images buttressed by an explanatory text. This format of multiple displacements underlines the distance we have travelled from
the seventeenth century, just as it makes us fully cognizant of its
signicance. Following the sequence of images and text, we see a
gradual substitution in the drawings of items of modern warfare
and death for the original antique tomb, as the tank advances into
Poussins pastoral landscape. First we see its turret and a stencilled
deaths head, then the tomb is shown changed into the shape of a
whole tank, built of stone blocks (camouaged as a blockhouse?),
and nally the tank, now represented as a fully ghting machine,
makes two appearances one with the Italian words Ancora in Arcadia Morte painted on its ank and the double lightning ash of
the German ss-Panzer Division on its turret, the second without
the lightning ashes but with a German inscription, Auch ich war
in Arkadien. The elaborate verbal texts gloss this reduction of the
elegiac in favour of the moralistic and explain the various allusions
that the new mottoes and the recongurations by Poussin of
Guercino, by Hincks of the various painters introduce. Such
96 et in arcadia ego
expanded commentary, with references to other texts and images,

becomes a favourite means by which Finlay can collapse the distance
between his work and earlier artists, yet without losing an appeal to
a rich fund of ideas and associations: his proposal for a tempietto
at Little Sparta, for instance, manages to condense a whole body
of scholarship into a few notes, while the sheepfold proposal for
the Magdeburg Garden Show includes a miniature bibliography.3
What the Footnotes do not explicitly state is that, while Poussin
could signal his mildly compromised Arcadia by an antique sarcophagus and a Latin epitaph, today we need the more emphatic
tank and its reference to the horric ss; otherwise we would see
only a wonderful, idyllic landscape and shepherds in classical garb.
The translation of this darker view of Arcady into gardens also required Finlay to nd ways to subvert our un-strenuous ideas of
horticultural retreats. For him, Arcady must be palpable as a place
as well as a metaphor, so that we feel physically and imaginatively
the co-existence of the idyllic and brute force as a principle of
nature.4 This duality is embedded within the long traditions of
regarding Arcady, though that doubleness is sometimes forgotten.
100 Nicolas Poussin, Et In

Arcadia Ego, c. 1630, oil on
canvas. Chatsworth.
97
Geographically located in the Peloponessus, Arcadia is in fact

an arid, dry and unwelcoming place, described by the Spartan
Polybius as a poor, bare, rocky, chilly country.5 But climate
change is the artists prerogative, so Arcadia was transformed into
a mythical place of happiness and perfect bliss by poets (Theocritus indirectly, but principally Virgil) and painters (Finlay would see
Poussin and Claude as primary). Or such is a usual emphasis. In fact,
the closer one examines these early visions of Arcadian pastoralism, the more their scepticisms with this wholly imaginary place
emerge. Virgils shepherds are not strangers to grief and longing,
even though they inhabit a territory of supreme harmony. Of the
most famous inhabitant of Arcady, Pan, we often hear tell of his
music that communicates the varieties of nature, but also of the
inducement of sudden terror or panic, to which he gives his name.6
While the landscape paintings of Claude and Poussin are frequently
magical prospects of preternatural felicity, graced with classical
buildings, fecund land and seductive aerial perspective, they also tell
stories of death, despair and disaster: a man is strangled by a snake
in Poussin, Claudes Cupid languishes by the Castle of Psyche, or
his Eurydice is fatally bitten by a serpent, and the more one probes
other narratives that the paintings locate in these glorious landscapes the less happy do they seem. So the bliss and happiness are
at the very least held in check, tensed against threats and violence.
And this duality is what Finlay was particularly concerned to
show us, as he moved from printed to landscape reiterations of the
drama and dramatis personae of Arcadia. At Little Sparta, there are
both hints and outright statements. When the inscription on a
stone version of Pans pipes or syrinx tells us to heed whence the
wind blows (illus. 85), we are gently warned to be alert; the graveyard format of many stones in the landscape the hic jacet . . .,
the Achten Minen!, the Epitaph for a torpedoed schooner, or the
actual memorials to the Finlay pets all remind visitors that death
holds sway even in these gardens. But then we cannot escape the
direct representations of violence Apollo with his music and his
missiles (like the mythical Pan with his club), and his severed head
in the woodland; the violence of the sea, and the lost ships with
ower names; the terror along with the pastoral of the French
Revolution like honeysuckle growing on a guillotine pergola in
one of Finlays prints.7
That nature has, and uses, brute force is no news. But the way
in which it is somehow ignored in certain contemporary attitudes
towards landscape and gardens is what Finlay needed to challenge.
98
et in arcadia ego
Yet the terror provoked by the violence of nature, including human

nature, is also sublime. And the sublime, like the sacred with which
it is allied, is an experience of awe and piety that Finlay believed had
been lost today. He did, however, see it at work in neo-classical art
Poussin, for example and especially in the art and writings of
the French Revolution. The appeal of Arcady is a major element,
then, in what Finlay called his neoclassical rearmament campaign,
for which he has devised A New Arcadian Dictionary.8
99
11 [Neo-]classical landscapes
Neoclassicism builds elegiac
as well as triumphal arches
101 (Classical) Landscape,

n., with Kathleen Lindsley,
1966, folded card. Inside is
printed: (Classical)
landscape, n. a stand of
concepts.
The woodcut image on one of Finlays Christmas cards (1966)

showed the only too familiar landscape of Stourhead, one of the
National Trusts agship gardens. Inside was printed what purported to be a dictionary denition: (Classical) landscape, n. a
stand of concepts (illus. 101). Finlay has often and creatively used
this conventional dictionary formulation to extend, challenge or
even highjack some of our most cherished convictions or inert
assumptions. Here the noun landscape, modied by the bracketed Classical, is dened as a stand of concepts, which opens up
several possibilities. Stourhead is classical, in that it is one of the
premier landscape gardens of the eighteenth century (its a classic,
in short). It also draws upon a whole world of classical antecedents
from literary inscriptions of Virgil to temples based upon classical
models (the Stourhead temple depicted on the card is its Pantheon,
a miniaturized English version of that erected in Rome by Agrippa
in the rst century bc). But stand manipulates the denition
somewhat: the classical landscape now stands for something, or
takes its stand; or maybe it is a cluster of things, like a stand of
timber, with even the further sense that one cuts down a stand of
timber to make something else; stand also suggests like trees
that a classical landscape is long-standing. As usual with Finlay,
100
theres a lot packed into a small space, which is also the case with
a landscape like Stourhead.
Stourhead was a prime example of the revival of classical themes
for fresh consumption in eighteenth-century England. Its Neoclassicism is what attracts Finlay, not least because he, too, sought
a parallel revival; doubtless, too, he was taken by its culminating
structure, the Temple of Apollo, modelled upon a recent eighteenthcentury discovery in Baalbek (now in Lebanon) that the gardens
creator, Henry Hoare, would have discovered through the printed
medium of an engraved book illustration (a process of inspiration
so reminiscent of Finlays own researches).1 In the case of both
Stourhead and Little Sparta, however, we must guard against
reading the strategy of copying antiquity as merely nostalgic,
atavistic: what we have is the invocation of the past for a prime
contemporary purpose. Neo-classicism was and still can be a mode
of modernism, not a culture of historical revival; it seeks to purge
the cultural scene of fuss and ostentation and recover a forgotten
simplicity, austerity and clarity.2 It is now, as it was for many in the
late eighteenth century, a means of reformation.
Finlays neo-classicism throws its net wide. But here we may at
least begin with two Neoclassical garden landscapes that have fascinated him. In both the classical was made new and relevant, yet
in neither site was there any sense that the modern was being
avoided. Indeed, their modernity was made visible in their reuse
of the classical. Both The Leasowes in Worcestershire, created in
the years after 1745, and Ermenonville north-east of Paris (1760s
and 1770s) serve Finlay better than the famous Stourhead, simply
because they have not become popular icons of contemporary
garden-tourism (an abstracted image of Stourhead has actually
appeared in English railway carriages). They have also lost their
original coherence; so that fragmented and parcelled out among
different local amenities and entities or half-buried beneath golf
courses, they now need recapitulation and completion in the imagination of the garden historian. They do not have the polished,
almost stiing, perfection of a Stourhead. So it is to their different
and somewhat fractured example that Finlay can turn for his
own stand of concepts, and we must also remember that he had
access to them only at second-hand, through the words and images
of others.
Ermenonville and The Leasowes are strikingly different one,
the estate of a wealthy and aristocratic French landowner who
was prominent in the pre-revolutionary years for his support of
101
102 Engraved view of The

Leasowes from The Works,
in Verse and Prose of
William Shenstone (5th
edition, London, 1777).
Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the other, a much more modest (if no less

ambitious in its own terms) creation of a minor English poet.3 They
nonetheless share some remarkable aspects. Both saw themselves
as new and modern, even revolutionary in their assumptions about
how gardens could be designed and perform a cultural role. Above
all, both relied upon inscriptions to orientate their visitors; each
invoked gures classical in England (Virgil), contemporary in
France (Rousseau) to whom Finlay also looked.
What The Leasowes (illus. 102) has meant for Finlay can perhaps be gauged from two proposals that he himself made for it.
One took up Shenstones provision of inscribed benches (see
above in Inscriptions) a simple landscape insertion that had
practical as well as imaginative potential; there were to have been
40 or so of these at The Leasowes, placed to command views,
and often inscribed so as to provide hints to spectators, lest in
passing curiosity thro the farm they might suffer any of that immense variety the place furnishes, to escape their notice.4 Finlays
own proposal for an inscription, taken verbatim from Dodsleys
contemporary description of Shenstones garden, simply described
the way its rill cascaded and murmured down a shady valley; but
reiterated on the modern bench the words encourage visitors to
look around and listen to the landscape and also require the alert
102 [neo-]classical landscapes
ones to understand what had been lost since the eighteenth century. The second, unexecuted, proposal would have used the views
for which The Leasowes was once famous, quoting Thomas
Wrights Universal Architecture of 1775 on the use of an obelisk
suited to a Situation commanding an extensive Prospect.5 Finlays
classical obelisk, to be installed within the original territory of The
Leasowes, was to have been inscribed twice:
from this spot may be seen the works of walter somers
forgemasters inadvertent manufacturers of parts for
the iraqi super-gun
followed below with
citius elephantem sub ala celes sooner could you hide
an elephant under your armpit
the reference being to Saddam Husseins surreptitious efforts to
obtain weapon parts, inadvertently supplied by the Somers
foundry. Here Finlay is engaged in two, related moves: a familiar
one is to introduce into the natural and inoffensive scenery of the
old garden an allusion to warfare and violence that cannot be
disguised or hidden, and the other is to startle visitors into connecting the merely historical place of Shenstones garden with
contemporary issues.
Finlay shared and acknowledged Shenstones limited nancial
resources, so the bench and obelisk, rather than temples and elaborate sculpture, serve his purposes well, honouring Shenstone while
at the same time embodying in the austerity of their insertions a
classical restraint and moral stance. The strategic convergence of
ideas between these two gardenists is typical of Finlays emphatic
rejection of any merely historical importance in past art works: I
dont feel a distance between me and the classical.6
Finlay must also have appreciated, even as he sought to reinterpret it, Shenstones specic landscape reference to Virgil. The
eighteenth-century gardenist endorsed the insertion of items into
gardens as a means to connect ideas . . . [and] convey reections
of the pleasing kind (as Shenstone himself put it in Unconnected
Sentences). Thus in a part of his ground that he called Virgils
Grove Shenstone paid tribute to a fellow poet, James Thomson, by
inscribing one of his benches with lines from Virgils Fifth Eclogue.
The quotation worked in exactly the ways that Finlay has followed
103
two hundred years later: the Latin collapsed the distance between
Virgils time and Thomsons by referring to song in terms that
could apply equally to the classical poet and to the contemporary
author of The Seasons, a poem published in 1730 with frontispieces
by William Kent. Furthermore, the conjunction of their songs with
natural phenomena that never age or date, the whisprings of the
southern breeze and the crash of the breaking wave, also closes
the historical gap between them.7 And in his turn Finlay has commemorated Shenstone at Little Sparta, appropriately enough in the
newest section of the English Parkland, where we can nd a bronze
wheelbarrow dedicated to Shenstone. While its form may seem
vaguely old-fashioned, its obvious resemblance to the modern garden version emphasizes Finlays pleasure in both its practicality
and its modernity (illus. 103) and suggests that the earlier gardeners
work continues today.
The estate at Ermenonville, in contrast to The Leasowes, was a
site where political and revolutionary matters predominated. Its
owner, the Marquis de Girardin, was also in a position to implement more expensive landscape works, including a Temple of
Modern Philosophy (illus. 104), its columns (anticipating Finlays
inscribed tree columns perhaps) being dedicated to Newton,
Descartes, Voltaire, William Penn, Montesquieu and Rousseau for
their advocacy (respectively) of light, natures abhorrence of a
vacuum, ridicule, humanity, justice and nature herself; other
columns were left lying on the ground to be installed when more
worthy dedicatees were found. Like Shenstone, however, whose
Leasowes he had visited during a trip to England, Girardin deployed
inscriptions as a means of stimulating ideas and emotions, and, as
Finlay would do indirectly, invoked painterly inspirations for his
designs. As with Shenstones Unconnected Sentences and Dodsleys
description of his gardens, so Girardins landscape was available
to Finlay through two texts: Girardins own theoretical treatise, De
la Composition des paysages of 1777, which clearly, if indirectly,
discusses the design of Ermenonville, and an illustrated guidebook
of 1788 sometimes, though erroneously, attributed to Girardin
himself or his son.
For Finlay it was above all Rousseau who helped to connect his
own Little Sparta with this French landscape, his own neo-classical
rearmament with that of the French Revolution. As visitors close
the nal gate at Little Sparta and begin their visit, they may see that
on the inside of its top bar is written Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Citoyen de Genve 17121778. And the rst garden segment to the
103 The arcadia column

and Shenstone wheelbarrow in the English
Parkland, Little Sparta.
105
104 Ermenonville: The

Temple of Modern Virtue,
1775.
visitors left is called Julies Garden, recalling the heroine of

Rousseaus La Nouvelle Hlose. Rousseau had been a guest at Ermenonville during the last, embittered year of his life, when he had
the use of a simple, thatched cabin erected for him by Girardin
(illus. 105), and where he left unnished at his death in 1778 the
movingly titled work, Les Rveries du promeneur solitaire. He was
buried on its Isle of Poplars (illus. 106), in a tomb designed by
Hubert Robert, though eventually his body was removed to the
Panthon in Paris. On its way there in 1795 the procession stopped
in the garden of the Tuileries and the Ile des Peupliers was represented in the grand basin with the cenotaph at its centre, and
painted twice by Hubert Robert. Finlay was told about these events
for the rst time by Michel Baridon, who jokingly remarked that
Rousseau must have been the rst man in the world who carried
his landscape along with him when he moved places after his
death. But Finlay was not amused, rather was apparently deeply
moved.8 He understood in Baridons remark a more penetrating
possibility of meaning. For Rousseau has, in a sense, moved once
again with his attendant landscape, for he is now to be encountered in several places at Little Sparta: a tree plaque on the little
island of the Upper Pond reads LIle des Peupliers, and recalls his
rst burial place; while a small stone in the shape of Roberts tomb
for Rousseau is carved with the words of flutes & wild roses
(illus. 13).9 Those words in fact derive from the Monteviot Proposal
of 1979, which is presented as if written by Rousseau, so in a sense
his presence has lurked behind Finlays landscape proposals from
very early on in his designs for gardens and landscapes. But the
105 Rousseaus cabane

at Ermenonville,
erected 1780s.
example of Ermenonville greatly enlarged his understanding of

what Rousseau could mean to his neo-classical garden plans.
It is also important to insist that Finlays garden work never
looks or feels at all like The Leasowes or Ermenonville do or ever
did; and this is not because Finlay never saw them at rst hand. If
he cuts down the stand of timber in a classical landscape, he opts
to reuse it in ways that are new, even surprising, not just mimetic,
formulaic or facsimiled. Neo-classical in the French seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries was itself never classicism; though it may
have used narrative themes and archaeologically authentic scenery
and architecture, at its best it was never to be confused with its
sources. In Finlays case what distinguish his neo-classicism are
its self-imposed severity and his acknowledgement that even while
107
106 Ermenonville, the

tomb of Rousseau on the
Isle of Poplars, established
after 1778.
insisting that it is still a plausible vision today he must also lament

that such a perspective is necessary.
Two non-garden works help us to understand what Neoclassicism means for Finlay, especially when it is articulated through
garden art. An emblem-like screen print with Ron Costley from
1987 depicts the sloping blade of the guillotine, inscribed laconic,
on a blood-red background; below is homage to neo-classicism.
The next year, with Annet Stirling, he made a table-top maquette
in the form of a black slate arch, inscribed with neoclassicism
bvilds elegaic as well as trivmphal arches.10 The rst
work apostrophizes the terseness, the severity and the cleanness
of the Neoclassical; but it is also pure Finlay in the mode of its
announcement, the power of the medium. In gardens that
means letting the whole scene do what it can through sharp, very
controlled design, with no fuzzy edges, no fumbling. The second
acknowledges that the Neoclassical includes both an element of
excited triumphalism and a sense of something lost whether in
the distance between today and the heyday of Neoclassicism, or in
the very severity and toughness that its demands must continue
to make. To risk a bad pun, the cutting-edge of neo-classicism
experienced in a pastoral setting like Little Sparta or the parkland
of Documenta 7 (illus. 115) will have a Spartan severity to sustain
both its laconic attitude and its faint sense of something long since
past and yet recoverable. That is one of Finlays distinctive contributions to landscape designs renewal of a Neoclassical mode.
108
[neo-]classical landscapes
12 Revolutions
.
You cannot step into the same Revolution twice
107 Tree-column bases,

Krller-Mller Museum,
Otterlo, Netherlands.
Though it is a crucial element of Finlays neo-classicism, his fascination with the French Revolution deserves separate consideration, if only because it must be seen as part of a much larger
concern with cultural revolution in general. And it poses as do
several of his other concerns, like the sea and Ovidian metamorphosis the more immediate question of how it pertains to
his garden art. He makes, unsurprisingly, his own very personal
connections.1
Like many revolutionary episodes in human history that stake
their claims upon a return to basic, rst principles, the French Revolution appealed to ideas of nature uncorrupted by contemporary
culture. One account of its historical signicance must certainly
insist upon its high idealism, its dedication to fundamental
human rights and its nostalgia for an ancient Roman republicanism. The ip-side was its descent into terror, its self-corruption
by the very ideals it sought to sustain. Finlay acknowledged several
of its main actors, whose presence is inscribed variously in his
sites and who thereby introduce into the landscapes associations
and ideas that we need to understand as somehow apt for gardens.
In the grove at the Krller-Mller (illus. 145) and again at Little
Sparta trees are dignied with column bases inscribed with the
names of Rousseau, Robespierre, Corot and Michelet (plus the
109
108 A tree-column base

in shadow, Little Sparta.
classical lawgiver, Lycurgus of Sparta). The simple dignity by

which these historical gures are honoured links them unforgettably to the uprightness of natures most crucial item, the tree.2 But
the values that each of these revolutionary gures represents
within Finlays landscape repertoire need to be claried.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose writings underpinned much of
the revolutionary principles and zeal for reform, cherished the unspoilt rural life, the simplicity of the human heart, and promoted
high standards of equality, liberty and justice. He is, as we have
already seen in the previous section, much remembered at Little
Sparta. In the garden of Fleur de lAir, two bronze busts of the
French writer on stone plinths are among the nal encounters of
visitors in the lower slopes, where nature is wilder and has lost its
once managed appearance (illus. 109). Even though Finlay has explained his view that for the best of the Jacobins the French Revolution was intended as a pastoral whose Virgil was Rousseau,3 here
in Provence both the situation and the anagram of his name on
one base that reads sovr vase hint more perhaps at the bitterness
of his last years before that death at Ermenonville.
109 The two

anagrammed busts
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
at Fleur de lAir.
But Finlay also cherished Rousseau for other emblematic moments that are recounted in his autobiographical Confessions.4 At
Little Sparta there is a nger-post marked vincennes, an insertion that has its origins in the Wild Hawthorn Press 5 Signposts of
1989 and that refers to Rousseaus own account of walking towards
110 revolutions
Vincennes to visit the imprisoned Denis Diderot and stopping to

rest in the shade of a tree beside the road; there he dreamed of
entering an essay competition (which he later did and won) on the
theme of the contribution of re-established sciences and arts to
the purication of morals. Finlays own work has similarly taken
up the challenge to confront what Rousseau (in the same incident)
called the contradictions of the social system . . . the abuse of our
institutions that are to be combated only through the natural
goodness of humans. The reference to Vincennes is oblique at best:
the signpost at Little Sparta points the way to somewhere outside
the garden and far away, but in the garden we have probably little
inkling of where the path leads unless we can recall the narrative
of Rousseaus Confessions. Yet the determination of Rousseaus
vision on that momentous occasion to re-establish knowledge
and learning in the interests of enabling a revolution of morality
is Finlays own, and the revival of garden art is his chosen vehicle:
that, at least, is made clear in many ways as we wander around
Little Sparta.
Another Rousseau-moment has appealed to Finlay and been
variously couched in landscape terms. Again the Confessions provides the authorizing text, when Rousseau describes how he
climbed into a cherry tree and threw ripe fruit down to girls below;
this LIdylle des cerises was transposed into a booklet of 1983 by
Finlay as an idyll (a short pictorial poem, according to the dictionary). In its turn the printed text and imagery explain how that
story could be materialized5 into a design for a grove of gean or
wild cherry trees in the midst of which rises a short, uted column
bearing a bronze or stone basket of cherries inscribed with the title,
as one might nd it within a real bosquet (illus. 110). One realization of this proposal will be discovered by the attentive visitor to
110 An opening of LIdylle

des Cerises, with Michael
Harvey, 1986.
111
111 An opening of Un
Jardin Rvolutionnaire.
Hotel des Menus Plaisirs,
Versailles, 1988, booklet,
with Alexandre
Chemetoff, Sue Finlay
and Nicholas Sloan.
Little Sparta, who, upon closing the last gate inscribed with the
name of Rousseau, will discover it immediately on his left in what
Finlay named Julies Garden.
Another actual bosquet projected but, sadly, never materialized
for the Htel des Menus Plaisirs at Versailles also cited Rousseaus
cherry trees. This Jardin Rvolutionaire (illus. 111) was commissioned from Finlay to celebrate the bicentenary of the French
Revolution, in particular the site where the Estates General debated
the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, and the design incorporated a quotation from Michelet engraved on huge
blocks of stone:
nous voulions graver notre loi sur la pierre du droit
eternel sur le roc qui porte le monde linvariable justice et lindestructible equite
(We would wish to engrave our law on the stone of eternal right
on the rock that brings the world invariable justice and indestructible equity). The blocks were to be set beneath wild cherry
trees and poplars, further garden homage to Rousseau in life and
in death, though the poplars (peupliers) were also for the populace/
people. The Michelet quotation eventually found its place halfway
down the terraces at Fleur de lAir (illus. 69), where it occupies a
position that, we later realize, is symbolically midway between the
presences of Saint-Just in the house and of Rousseau at the foot of
112
revolutions
112 A close-up of the the

present order stones.
the slope. Unlike the Versailles scheme, it now stretches in one long
unvarying, if broken, and yet unmovable line.
Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just were
both crucial players in the Revolution itself: the former led the
Jacobins who elaborated the structures and framework of the new
state, the latter wrote fervently and relentlessly to promote the new
liberation. Both subscribed to the reign of terror, with its endless
bloodshed at the guillotine, because they felt that only a erce but
just regime could combat weakness of will and sloppy adherence
to high ideals. Robespierre invoked a Spartan virtue in justication of the Terror. And he had at least one garden connection that
must have appealed to Finlay, since his crusade to maintain religion
tailored for a secular and civic society saw its climax in the Festival of the Supreme Being that was held in the garden of the Tuileries
during the summer of 1794. Ironically, both men were themselves
victims of revolutionary terror and hysteria and died, Saint-Just
at the age of only twenty-six, under the blade of the guillotine.
Saint-Just looms largely at Little Sparta: well known, indeed, as
one of the most publicized images of the garden, are the huge
stone blocks where his words, the present order is the disorder of the future, are inscribed (illus. 5, 45). Further, it is
his remark that is found on the small piece by Lochan Eck, the
world has been empty since the romans (illus. 60). Saint-Just
appealed to Finlay above all for his daring or audacity and, perhaps, for being an accomplished ute-player.6 But he also would
113
have been appreciated for his constant, if problematical, appeals

to nature, many of which have survived in a small notebook preserved since 1947 in the Bibliothque Nationale in Paris.7
Jules Michelet and Camille Corot are celebrated by Finlay because,
as respectively historian of the French Revolution and latter-day
painter of sometimes un-classical landscapes, they reinterpreted
for subsequent generations both the large historical events and the
mythical ambiance of the revolutionary love of countryside. These
roles are exceptionally crucial for Finlay, for since you cannot step
twice into the same Revolution (any more than into the same
river), it follows that the historical event must be revisited and recapitulated. Michelet is one historian who does that, providing a
model predecessor for Finlays own new perspectives on the Revolution, while his contemporary, Corot, seems more immediately
relevant when it is a question of nding ways to recongure how
a modern garden-maker can redo French neo-classical landscapes
like Claudes and Poussins in the light of the Revolution.
Though it has profoundly changed how the world is and how
we look at the world, what was valuable in that one momentous
revolutionary French event at the end of the eighteenth century
cannot be repeated. Its lessons good as well as bad must be
translated for current use (a theme taken up in the following section). Hence one of Finlays much-used dictionary denitions
from 1986 reads: revolution, n. a scheme for the improving of a
country; a scheme for realizing the capabilities of a country. A
return. A restoration. A renewal.8
In translating the lessons of history, reworkings and reinterpretation (even to the point of selective exaggeration or distortion) are
necessary if we are to prot by learning new uses from the past.
Gardens can be particularly helpful here, since they have themselves
constantly to be remade. Also, since we do not expect revolutionary
themes to be ensconced in gardens, when they do in fact appear
there, this translation and fresh relevance are clearer. Is it, then,
too much to discover in the language of Finlays denition of revolution a couple of intimations of landscape art a renewals
improvement of a country, rediscovering its capabilities la
Lancelot Brown?9
One mode of French revolutionary change or reinvention that
clearly appealed to Finlay in his role as garden poet is the invocation of natural materials for the reinvention of the calendar, which
was entrusted in 1793 to Philippe Fabre dEglantine, a Jacobin poet
who was also a victim of the guillotine. He is recognized both by
114 revolutions
name and by implication at Little Sparta. The new and elaborate

republican nomenclature of days, weeks and months invoked the
world of agriculture (tools and animals) and trees and plants for
instance, Pluvise is the month of rain, Thermidor, that of heat;
saints days were recongured as owers and trees; days are re-named
after gardening tools like Arrosoir (watering-can). This calendar
is commemorated along a pathway to the Upper Pond at Little
Sparta, where concrete replicas of baskets holding fruits, nuts
and sh recall the inspiration for the new calendar of months
(illus. 8), now divided into ten-day cycles named for rural activities and produce. The calendar is no longer used; but gardeners
surely mark the progress of the days, weeks and months by the
fruits and owers that their labours make available to them.
It is sometimes difcult to grasp exactly what Finlay wants us
to understand from his references to the historical events of the
Revolution, especially when they are encountered within gardens
that lack a discursive context that might elsewhere illuminate his
ideas. Such ambiguities come with the territory, and they allow
some openness of response. But two things do stand out.
The rst is a stern refusal exemplied in some of his dealings
with contemporary culture to abandon strict principles, coupled
with a determination and will to maintain integrity and probity
at the expense of moderation and compromise. Various elements
at Little Sparta seem to propose this stern disposition the heavy,
unmoveable blocks inscribed with Saint-Justs the present
order is the disorder of the future, or the line of white
columns dedicated to the French Revolutionary Committee of
Public Safety and inscribed, with characteristic sleight of phrase,
Liberty, Equality and Eternity and the date 1793 (illus. 113).
Jessie Sheeler glosses Finlays purpose here as marking the thou-
115
113 Looking across the

Temple Pool, Little Sparta,
towards, on the left, the
small temple dedicated to
Baucis and Philemon and,
on the right against the
house, four white
columns, each with a single inscription: Liberty,
Equality, Eternity, 1793.
1793 column by the side
of the main farm building.
sands [that] found eternity at the guillotine rather than fraternity

in the new society,10 those, in short, who refused to compromise
their ideals. But the columns may also celebrate the Revolutionary hope for an unending triumph.
Gardens, however, clearly allow more opportunity for ambiguity, for openness of response, than do explanatory or analytical
texts by which we try to grasp the meanings of objects and historical events. Near the house at Little Sparta is a stone, its lettering
now somewhat worn, inscribed with both a reference to Ovids tale
of Apollo and Daphne and (on its rear) a bibliography of relevant
readings: Apollo is now claimed to be the loving young revolutionary and Daphne the fearful shy republic; the references on
the verso take us to Ovids text, Saint-Just et lAntiquit, Mignets
history of the French Revolution, Walter Paters essay on Apollo
and the art historian Rudolf Wittkower, who had written on
Berninis statue of Apollo and Daphne. It is impossible to use all
these citations and their various perspectives as one stands in the
garden (doubtless on ones Blackberry it might, courtesy of the internet, be possible in the future, though wireless reception is signicantly not good here!); at best these references set out the
homework we need to do later. But the recto of the stone seems to
offer a more accessible and immediate message, if itself ambiguous:
an uneasy tension between the political will to reform on the one
hand and, on the other, anxiety as to its terrifying consequences.
When we also recall that Ovids tale moves through metamorphosis to stasis, with the shy republic transformed into laurel (like the
Revolutionary calendar) before she can be violently raped, Finlays
attitude seems nicely calibrated to put the onus for judgement
upon his garden visitors. Later in the garden the steel silhouettes
that represent this OvidianRevolutionary parable are also held in
a timeless moment (Berninis wonderful capture of a moment rendered more static in their new, two-dimensional formulation),
which spectators may decipher as they may.
The second point, more readily grasped, is Finlays constant
refusal to let visitors forget that natures dark and ruthless side
coexists with its idyllic and pastoral one, for which the complex
character and events of the French Revolution proved a potent
analogy. Not that the sentimental and benign are always denied,
only held constantly in check. The mildly erotic tone of Rousseaus
irtation with the young girls in his cherry idyll, the materialization of which is found in various modied forms in Finlay
landscapes, is somewhat different from Apollos frantic pursuit of
116 revolutions
Daphne. Yet even while he registers this more Rousseau-like,

pastoral quietude, what Finlay seems to derive from his contemplation of events and ideas in the French Revolution is a fascination
with the violence that inhabits nature, including human nature,
and the violence with which change must sometimes be engineered. An eloquent version of this dichotomy, materialized in
modied landscape forms, was his installation at the Kassel Documenta of 1987, entitled View to the Temple (illus. 115). Four full-size
guillotines, their blades engraved with admonitions about the
sublime, led the eye, as if through a sequence of modied Roman
triumphal arches, towards a small Neoclassical temple on an island
117
115 View to the Temple,

installed for Documenta
7 in Kassel, Germany,
in 1987.
in the landscape park. Another garden celebration of this inherent paradox that nature contains equal measures of the benign
and the violent is the print of 1987 of a guillotine regured now
as a garden trellis entwined with honeysuckle; its text acknowledged Rousseau as the origin of both sentimental gardening and
the French Revolution.11 In both projects it is essential to see more
than just the guillotine the island temple and the honeysuckle
are essential parts of the whole emblem, whether on the page or
in the park.
The destructive forces of Revolution may lead to better things,
to a society puried by humans own willed actions. Apollo may
now carry a machine gun (rather than his mythical Far-Shooter),
but its use is in his hands, and he lives and even dies according to
his own code of violence (though an immortal, it is his golden,
decapitated head that we discover in the woodland). But Finlay is
also aware of other dangers that humans do not control, though
they may invoke them: along with the cruelty of the sea, lightning,
the ancient thunderbolt of the gods, is one of natures impersonal
terrors. The double lightning strike assumed as the insignia of the
hated German ss recurs through much of Finlays meditations,
whether on the page or in a landscape, as a symbol of natures
(including human natures) intractable capacity for destruction
and death. He explained its signicance for him as the ultimate
wildness in a scale whose other, cultivated extreme is the eighteenth
century.12 So death is always lurking in even the most perfect and
bucolic of Arcadias, just as the pillar announcing the location of
Arcady that is lying on the ground in the English Parkland at Little
Sparta is, signicantly, broken and rent in two.
And Little Sparta itself endured its own, particular war, when
Finlay and his associates were forced to defend the garden against
quite literal attacks by the local government body, Strathclyde
Region; that they wielded the ironies and mock impedimenta of
real war did not make the central issue, about which the war was
declared, any less serious. A card printed in 1996 mimicked the
notices on War Department properties in the United Kingdom and
announced simply: arcadia w. d. property.
For Finlay, as he explained it to Paul Crowther in one of his
more sustained explanations of this event, the Little Sparta War
was about the fundamental problem . . . [of] piety and the total
secularization of culture and whether a building that housed
works of art in the garden should be classied by the local rating
authority as a temple rather than a gallery.13 Finlay fought to
118
revolutions
maintain the hierarchy of words, really a question of levels, and

to have acceded to the designation of the Temple as a gallery would
have been to accept it as merely an aspect of tourism. The name,
Little Sparta, was accordingly adopted as a quite deliberate ideological gesture, to confront Edinburgh as the Athens of the North
with a modern site that revived and maintained the severe virtues
of its ancient Greek enemy. But then again, Finlay said, Sparta
has certain reverberations which are pleasing to me and of course
Sparta has a very inuential role in the French Revolution which
is important to me.
But the dening aspect for the visitor who confronts the French
Revolution in one of Finlays gardens is that the garden itself acquires
revolutionary signicance; it cannot be as we have previously imagined a garden to be before this encounter. The garden has itself
become the new revolution. For we expect ideas and ideology to
have some material, physical manifestation; we expect places to
behave and be readable according to their creators beliefs: there is
an analogy, wrote the French translator of Thomsons The Seasons,
between our situations, the states of our spirit (on the one hand),
and (on the other) places, phenomena, the states of nature.14 I shall
postpone to my nal paragraph, however, the challenge posed by
this view of Finlays garden as itself the Revolution.
119
13 Errata, or recovered in translation

Camouage is the last form of
classical landscape painting
Since we cannot step into the same Revolution twice, any revolutionary wisdom from the past has to be re-viewed and refurbished
for future use, and our recognition of that reinterpretation will be
the more acute if we can be made aware of it happening, if for
example it occurs in a place where one would least expect it, like
a garden. The historical French Revolution, in short, can be best
appreciated if its essential events and messages are translated into
fresh terms that we can understand now, or when they can be revealed in the abstract by stripping them of incidental, historical
trappings and contexts. The Revolution can be translated, or what
might be called its historical camouage can be removed, and in
either case the garden suggests itself as both a plausible site for that
to happen and a useful medium for such manoeuvres. These are
themes and strategies that Finlay has pursued through many formulations and many designs.
The mode of translation, rst. Almost all the ideas and themes that
direct his own art were discovered by Finlay in earlier cultures, but
had then to be translated from those earlier manifestations into apt
contemporary modes. This implies correcting or emending their
earlier errors. He provides the necessary errata in order for them to
be usable once again. He does this, too, at all levels: at the level of
words that need emendation his play with the wavy proof-correction sign converts the muddled letters of vnda into a recognizable
word, or of aor into oar; at the level of concepts, that are serviceable once they have been reformulated by playing with a dictionary
[re-]denition; and, more broadly, with earlier art and artistic elements (paintings, sculptures, writings, mythology, designed landscapes, etc.) that can be revealed to have fresh meanings: hence the
markers that recite the names of English writers in the Parkland,1 or
the acknowledgement of Drer, Claude and other painters. Yet once
again, the question must be why and how do gardens and landscapes
provide Finlay with the best places in which to practise translation.
A simple and quick answer is Ovid, the Latin poet whose
celebration of transformations, or (as the title of his best-known
120
work has it) Metamophoses, takes the natural world as their stage
and material. Makers of Renaissance gardens appreciated the aptness of Ovids poetics for their garden stories and iconography, for
the changeful ambience and nuances of villa scenery, and for the
ways in which his dramatis personae often seemed to participate
in their natural settings. At the Villa dEste in the late sixteenth century the long walk beside the Hundred Fountains once presented
its visitors with terracotta plaques, each of which imaged an incident from Ovids poem (these images are now obscured with moss
and maidenhair fern). Or there is (still there) the sculpture of the
giant at the Medici villa of Pratolino who seems to be in the process
either of turning into rock or emerging from the hillside before
our very eyes.2 A good deal of Finlays garden poetry draws upon
these metamorphic traditions, nding modern ways of handling
this classical subject matter. The tradition of Ovid in the garden is
even adopted as a major theme in one of his most ambitious projects, Stockwood Park in Luton, opened in 1991.
The design of Stockwood Park fulls many of Finlays ambitions.
It functions both as a retreat and as an attack. It is uncompromising
in what it sets out to do, although it is equally capable of leaving
people to follow their own devices. One of its aggressive moves
is its use of references to the Roman poet in a public park located
121
116 Grove and exedra at

Stockwood Park, Luton.
in a town that might not be ideally suited to the appreciation of

classical poetry, mythology and lessons in transformation.
Equally, it challenges meagre notions of sculpture parks and private gardens, especially gardens that take their cue, as their plants,
from garden centres; yet it chooses to make its own proposals by
happy, if subversive, dependency upon those very staples of contemporary culture.
Perhaps its most deant gesture, as it is certainly the parks most
conspicuous installation, is the curved brick exedra on which are
eight plaques each inscribed with a particular Erratum of Ovid
(illus. 117 and 118). An erratum is the correction of a mistake in a
text, usually by the addition of a slip of paper pasted into a book
that explains the error; publishers have recourse to them when
alerting readers to mistakes that have found their way into print
too late to be emended before publication. In Luton, the panels
along the faade of the curving brick wall instruct visitors to correct or change a Latin word into an English one. To those with no
Latin or mythological knowledge, some will seem meaningless:
for
cyane
read
fountain
for
atys
read
pine
Others, however, may begin to make more sense, if only because

they reect more accessible and contemporary associations:
for
daphne
read
laurel
for
philomela
read
nightingale
Another pair seems to make it all bafingly simple, since all that
is required in the second is to change capital letters into lower case:3
for
narcissus
read
narcissus
for
echo
read
echo.
These are the Errata of Ovid, because they are references to

characters in the Metaphorphoses who are changed into natural
122
errata, or recovered in translation
117 The Errata of Ovid

exedral wall at Stockwood
Park, Luton.
lettering of one of the
Errata of Ovid exedra.
objects: bush, bird or stream. Many of the poems transformations

occur as a means of escaping some violent action Daphne eludes
the ferocious appetite of Apollo by being changed into a laurel
bush before she can be raped, while others are a means of escaping unending human sorrow like Psyches grief for her frustrated
love affair with Cupid.
What we might be expected to register here is the larger sense
that metamorphosis is exactly what our language and our landscapes have found that they must do with what they inherit they
must undergo transformation. We already know what a nightingale is, or an echo, or a laurel bush; we possess these and other
words to describe the things around us in a garden. Now we learn
how much these current linguistic resources that we take for
granted are drawn from earlier, classical roots. Another item, not far
from the exedra wall, consists of a pair of young trees, silver birches,
their bases fronted with a brick and stone column base (illus. 119).
The architectural base transforms the trees into columns, while its
inscription turns the Linnean botanical Latin, Betula pendula, into
the vernacular of silver birch. The linguistic translation is a familiar one: even if were not expert in horticultural Latin, we know it
is used and has English equivalents; by extension, we might just
get the classical, Vitruvian reference to tree trunks being the origin
of architectural columns, though here the metamorphosis is reversed since the tree becomes an element of a built structure. And
123
119 Double tree-columnbase at Stockwood Park,

Luton.
as visitors wander further in the parkland theyll nd a way to

conrm this understanding, perhaps, when they stumble upon a
large, architectural capital half-buried in the ground and, now,
largely obscured by the growth of bushes around it; though it has
no inscription, theyd probably describe it to themselves as a
buried capital and realize that that is precisely what both their
language and their landscapes are cultural resources to exhume
and recover. And as Finlay had cited Quatremre de Quincy in the
Luton proposal to the effect that in classical architecture the least
part of an elevation has the ability to make the whole known, so
we ourselves need to read the part for the whole and in Stockwood
Park, as in other places where extracts of ancient sculpture and
architecture are inserted, see hints of a larger, recoverable culture.
Other events in Stockwood Park lend themselves to this game
of transformation. When the original proposal was published in
1986, one of Gary Hinckss engravings was presented as after
Claude Lorrain, and most of the others depicted some familiar
Claudean landscapes a harbour, ruined temples, nymphs in the
meadows and a distant bridge in the valley (illus. 16).4 Yet the site
that was laid out at Luton obviously had to omit most of the classical imagery and staffage in order to accommodate or translate
the classical scenery for modern consumption. Yet that loss, that
inevitable slippage in translating both a design proposal into a
built work and its classical into modern references, is an essential
part of what Finlay is doing here. Most visitors, however, cannot
possibly know the text and images of the original proposal and so
124
120 Distant view from

across the remains of the
ha-ha towards the stone
Flock at Stockwood Park,
Luton.
make a comparison between them and the park as it came to be

laid out. But there are perhaps ways in which other parts of Stockwood Park may give them useful clues.
In the meadowland that lies beyond the Ovidian exedra and
placed alongside the vestigial remains of a now re-excavated ha-ha,
that device by which eighteenth-century English landscapers ensured a seamless visual connection between their gardens and the
pastureland beyond, is a group of large stones (illus. 120). They are
familiar enough, if we know other Finlay designs, but even if we do,
they will also surprise us. For one thing, they are usually appropriated as benches by mothers watching their children at play on the
grass; for another, one of them is engraved with an equally familiar
Finlay device, a reformed denition that reads: flock, n. a number
of a kind, an amplitude.
Below it, the inscription continues with a quotation from Edward Zellers Outlines of the History of Greek Philosophy (though
teasingly we are not told the source):
The Pythagoreans regarded men as the property of the gods,
as a sort of ock, which may not leave its fold
without the consent of the gods. Zeller.
We might have expected to see sheep grazing in the elds beyond the ha-ha of an English country estate; but this is now a
municipal public park, so another erratum is needed, and for
ock of real sheep we must now read blocks of stone. The joke
125
121 The Flock stones at

Stockwood Park, Luton.
122 Tree plaque: i sing

for the muses and
myself at Stockwood
Park, Luton.
is on us, but it should make us sharply aware of what has been

lost as well as gained in translation.5 Not least is the insight that
may occur once the alert visitor notices the positioning of sheep
in relation to the ha-ha and garden: the ock has actually
crossed the ditch and invaded the garden in yet another erratum
of landscape usage.
Stockwood Park is obviously no easy read. I have certainly talked
to locals frequenting the park who, bored or frustrated, found the
whole thing beyond them. Indeed, two inscriptions seem to warn
that this may be the case. One hung on a tree near the entrance
promises some solipsist song (i sing for the muses and myself, illus. 122); at the same time the invocation of the Muses, so
dominant at the entry into Fleur de lAir, is here somewhat minimal. The other inscription consists of three virtual anagrams on
the name of Aphrodite carved on a stone pedestal that originally
bore a bronze bust of her head: the rst of these declares i, hard
poet (somebody clearly found the whole thing altogether too
hard and removed the bust from its base; the plinth is now lying
on the ground). Two things might, however, be said in defence of
Stockwood Parks obscurity. An obvious one is that you can ignore
the insertions and enjoy the park, which people obviously do its
amenities do not negate the sculptures and inscriptions, but often
coexist with them. Or you can prot by the Errata of Ovid and
gradually learn how to recover something from its translations and
corrections. Furthermore, the whole way in which Stockwood is
approached and physically experienced offers lessons in ying
under the radar and learning to appreciate what its doing in
opposition to conventional parks and gardens.
126 errata, or recovered in translation
Stockwood Park is in fact juxtaposed to an old eighteenthcentury walled garden, rst enlarged in the nineteenth century
and now meticulously maintained by the local authority as a series of Period Gardens. In these we can enjoy, according to the
available brochure, brief insights into nine centuries of gardening from medieval to modern. There is a medieval section, a
Tudor knot garden, a Dutch garden with urns, a cottage garden
and Victorian bedding schemes with their adjacent conservatories
and wrought-iron pergola; scattered through these are classical
busts, reproductions of the famous Villa Borghese vases, an obelisk
and a statue of Pan holding his pipes. For those coming specically to visit what Stockwood Park calls The Hamilton Finlay
Sculpture Garden, this prelude holds some ironical possibilities
its very miscellaneous assemblage, colourful and charming no
doubt, is both the garden heritage against which Finlay works and
the traditions upon which he creatively draws. That there is also a
nursery garden not open to the public, similar to those garden
centres where you can buy plants to take home for your own garden, marks even more sharply the antithesis to Finlays vision of
garden art. After walking through the period gardens to enter the
park, the juxtaposition of one kind of landscape experience with
another is dramatically engineered.
Furthermore, visitors must navigate from the old walled garden
into the new park by several routes, one of which takes the form
127
123 The Improvement

Garden at Stockwood
Park, Luton, drawn by
Chris Broughton.
of an opening in the wall, which can be seen in the background of

the birds-eye view (illus. 123). Another, also imaged by the birdseye elevated perspective, brings the visitor into a blind alley of
hedges, at one end of which is a seat reminiscent of those that
William Kent installed at the edges of the bowling green in the
Oxfordshire garden of Rousham in the 1730s, and at the other is
the concealed entry into the parkland. This, to my mind the preferred entry into the parkland, also takes the visitor past two urns,
the second of which is set against the blank wall of the hedge;
replicas, both also recall those that Kent devised for Alexander
Popes famed garden of the 1730s and 40s in Twickenham.6 So that
when we emerge at last into the Finlay landscape we already have
something very specic in both historical and gardenist terms with
which to compare it. And the most prominent feature to greet us
there is yet another borrowed and reworked item from older traditions of landscaping: the brick Ovidian exedra echoes many such
structures that Kent introduced into the grounds of Chiswick and
Stowe, themselves indebted to earlier Italian examples.7
The same control of the visitors experience in entering his
parkland is exercised by Finlays deployment of sculpture. The visitor may assume at rst glance that Stockwood is a sculpture park,
especially when so advised by the signage and the brochure. But
Finlay thought the term sculpture garden misleading and himself always called Stockwood his Improvement Garden, drawing
handily upon the eighteenth-century notion of improving earlier
landscapes for contemporary use and pleasure.8 Indeed, in the
published proposals for Stockwood of 19856 one of the Detached
Sentences on Public Space (illus. 19) reads: Every summer, in
Europes sculpture parks, Art may be seen savaging Nature, for the
entertainment of tourists. I take this aphorism to be a complaint
that far too many sculpture parks simply use nature for their own
purposes, ignoring the ways in which sculpture might return visitors to better appreciations of both the natural world and cultural
evaluations of nature. As early as the Monteviot Proposal Finlay had
argued that so-called sculptural ornaments should draw attention
not to [themselves] but to the indigenous features of the woodland.9 Clearly, he did not intend his Luton park to fall into the
banal and muddled category of sculpture park; rather, he anticipated that his own sculptural insertions might salvage not savage
their natural surroundings. Indeed, compared to the sculpture in
the Period Gardens, even though one item there the Pan
chimes with his own visions of Arcady, Finlays insertions into the
128
Luton parkland serve to draw out and augment our perception

of their surroundings. And, in effect, the impression of Stockwood
is nothing like a sculpture park, and there are few tourists hellbent on entertainment, but mostly locals from one of the more
depressed populations in England, since Luton has one of the
highest unemployment rates and is now, perhaps not coincidentally, memorialized as the railway station from which the London
Underground bombers departed in July 2005. How such a local
population might understand Zellers gloss on the Pythagorean
notion of men as ocks which may not leave its fold without the
consent of the gods is almost imponderable.
Far away in Italy, Finlay also turned his back, this time quite
literally, on another sculpture park, the Parco di Celle, near Pistoia
(illus. 124). Forsaking the woodland scenery of the old Picturesque
parkland, with its rich assemblage of modern and contemporary
sculptural pieces, what he termed the Forest of the Avant-Garde,10
he opted instead for the adjacent, agricultural olive groves as the
site of a project entitled The Virgilian Wood. The olive grove is
barely modied by his insertions,11 which can easily be missed if
the eye, bombarded and dazzled by the artworks already encountered through the woodland, is not prompted to discover them in
the branches and on the ground. Between the trees are bronze
replicas of a Roman plough and a basket of lemons; hanging on
129
124 The Virgilian Wood

in the Parco di Celle,
Pistoia, Italy.
branches are two tree plaques. The words on the plaques and inscribed around the rim of the basket work to remind us of ancient
traditions of husbandry practised here in Italy and celebrated long
ago by Virgil, among other writers. On the shaft of the plough,
clearly not a modern type of instrument though familiar enough
from its modern versions, are the words the day is old by
noon, an observation that must still mean something to the
present-day agricultural labourer. The bronze basket with the
lemons speaks twice in Italian: il silenzio dopo il chiacchiero and lastringenza e dolce (respectively, Silence after
chatter and Astringency is sweet). Whether we relate those
phrases to the busy world of often elaborate sculpture through
which we have journeyed to this point is moot, but presumably
they may be so applied. In the trees one plaque speaks the local
Italian, and its partner provides an English translation:
125 Nicholas Sloans
drawing of a plough of
the Roman sort . . . , from
Finlays A Celebration of
the Grove (1984).
126 Sloans drawing of a
basket of lemons . . . ,
from A Celebration of the
Grove.
the silver flute / the rough bark

the silver bark / the rough flute.
This splendidly low-key work, almost sotto voce after the loud
conversations of the modernist artworks earlier in the Picturesque
parkland, may serve to introduce us to Finlays fascination with
camouage. The four items are either half-hidden in the branches
or, as a basket and a plough, not unexpected and so unremarkable
in an agricultural landscape. The inscriptions, especially on the
plough and the basket, are easily missed in the dark metal, and
while the lines on one tree are translated on the other, two other
phrases on the basket are left obscurely in their respective language.
Finally, the typical Finlayian play with the conjunction of four
words silver, rough, bark and ute discovers many hints of
metamorphosis within their word order. The minimalism conceals
much, and the scope of the references and associations takes time
to decode and uncover. His meaning is camouaged, but nonetheless recognizable.
The play with camouage may best be understood as an aspect
of Finlays translation of one thing into another in order that it
may be better appreciated, since translation entails the uncovering
in one language of what has been hidden in another. A published
example that nonetheless suggests garden possibilities will be useful. In the folded card of 1983, A Dryad Discovered (illus. 127), the
outside of the whole card is printed in pink/brown and green
camouage, like any military outt (the inside is aptly blank).
127 A Dryad Discovered, 1983, card

with Grahame Jones.
Emerging from this forest-like foreground a column of words

printed in black slowly discovers the eponymous Dryad, rst by
naming her anatomy (head, back, arm, hand . . . ) and then that of
the tree (root, stem, branch, twig . . . ). A dryad was the woodland
nymph of ancient Greece, and she is discovered for us by revealing
her human form beneath the tree just as the words peep through
the foliage of the card. The column of words also disguises a tree
until we discern it. As with all good camouage, however, once the
disguise has been penetrated, we tend to be able to see the tree and
the Dryad as alternating gures.
131
Finlay enjoys camouage both for its changeful, metamorphic

opportunities and for its military uses.12 Camouage disguises soldiers or their equipment (as also ghter planes and naval ships).
It is part of their tactics of attack, and therefore has its uses when
the strategy is for gardens to be attacks rather than simply retreats.
It allows the military to approach their targets unobserved, to inltrate without alerting even the most watchful opponents; it thus
has its defensive uses as well. Its various manifestations allow Finlay to sneak up on his garden visitors with unexpected or hitherto
unobserved experiences and ideas. Sometimes, like the Dryad on
the card, these are concealed within the textured woodland or
shrubbery; sometimes, half-buried in the ground, like the capital
at Luton; sometimes hidden in obvious places, like inscribed stones
in the grass and on brick paths, or rising above the water of a pond;
sometimes camouaged in Latin, or just temporarily inscrutable
even in English. All these hortulan disguises are a means by which
the visitor can be ambushed. Not a few visitors will miss many of
these camouaged events, for they are not supplements expected
in normal garden experience. Yet at least one is entirely apt for a
garden: the strawberry and raspberry beds at Little Sparta are
camouaged with coloured poles and sky-blue netting (illus. 128)
to protect their fruit from bird and human thief alike, while
throughout the garden stakes to which plants are tied have been
painted in camouage patches.
128 Camouaged fruit

canes at Little Sparta.
The block engraved with a denition of flock in Stockwood

Park is a characteristic Finlay device, which partakes both of metamorphosis and camouage: metamorphosis, because the format
is used to change a conventional meaning or our understanding
of a term, just as the stone sheep frequently become seats in the
park; camouage, because either the redenitions, linguistic and
material, sneak in a fresh idea under the guise of something we did
not think about before, or the denition plucks away the disguise
of convention to reveal a new meaning, just as persons sitting on
the blocks camouage the sheep. We might also add anagrams to
this collection of erratum games, since they are yet another way of
hiding one set of words inside another, which can be uncovered
only by penetrating the verbal subterfuge Finlay did this with the
name of Aphrodite on her plinth at Luton.
Dictionary redenitions have been a favourite device of Finlay
by which to prompt readers and later garden visitors to rethink
their assumptions, even to emend their errors (illus. 82 and 83).
Part of Finlays 1984 proposal for the Virgilian Wood was what he
called A Concise Celle Dictionary,13 containing seven denitions
of words that in all probability one would be tempted to use on
the spot in responding to his work; but they were not intended to
be available on the site. They are an intriguing batch, many with
distinct implications for how we might look at the natural world,
so that it is no surprise that they were reissued in 1989, independent of any specic site, as Seven Denitions Pertaining to Ideal
Landscape; some have since been placed in other gardens.14 Among
the words redened on separate pages was grove, which two
years earlier had already been offered by itself, alongside a drawing by Gary Hincks after the eighteenth-century antiquarian,
William Stukeley, and there inscribed with his phrase The antient
manner of Temples in Groves; it is now repeated among the Seven
Denitions as grove, n. an irregular peristyle, but without Stukeleys illustration of the temple. Others words redened in 1989 were
shadow, volute, horizon, improve, olive and nally
peace (the last but one was inserted, appropriately, into the
Provence garden, and the last alluded to on the ruined Cabane
there). Each card added to its etymological redenition a quotation from Milton (for grove), Coleridge (horizon), Virgil
(shadow), a seventeenth-century emblem book by Henry
Hawkins (for olive), a French Revolutionary slogan (for peace)
and Alberti (more obviously for volute, except that the redenition returns us to the natural world with a form subsisting in
133
the tree bark). improve, now dened as italicize, was linked to

an extract from a reported conversation between William Shenstone and James Thomson on a poets contributions to landscape
improvements at The Leasowes. Seven Denitions Pertaining to
Ideal Landscape is but one of many other printed works to address
both the ways of garden-making and the concepts and words we
deploy while doing so: from 1983, clearly referencing Finlays battles with Strathclyde Region, is the card where the faade of Little
Spartas Temple of Apollo has replaced the group of Muses in a
redrawn landscape of Claude Lorrain in the National Gallery of
Scotland, now glossed with temple, n. a sacred place; a place
menaced by bailiffs.15
By no means do all these denitions get inserted verbatim into
Finlays landscapes; the obvious exception is olive, redened as
a mean term for its middling place in Hawkinss analogy between
doves and olive trees. But what all the 1989 booklet versions do,
most very explicitly, is set out a strategy for experiencing gardens
and landscapes, providing a handy vocabulary for this better understanding, and therefore by extension for their making. Albertis
volute reminds us of architectures debts to the natural world
of woodland; Coleridges horizon and Virgils shadow exploit
psychological responses to elements of space and light without
which landscape would be unimaginable (shadow is now the
hour-hand of a sundial, horizon, an explication of the bound-
129 The allotment

re-denition inscription.
aries of human life). Many of these, and more, are reused with
great effect at Little Sparta: the shadow denition is inscribed
on an upright wooden post that throws its shadow across the
moorland heather, while the poetry and symbolism of horizons
are folded into the inscriptions on the nearby extract of stone walls
(illus. 143). All these redenitions become far more richly nuanced
by their now nding a place within a garden. So do others that address the world of practical gardening at Little Sparta, though with
a philosophical twist allotment, n. a garden of Epicurus. Another, underfoot on the stepping stones of the Middle Pond,
reads ripple n. a fold, a fluting of the liquid element
(illus. 82 and 83).
Gardens are supposed to rejuvenate, reanimate and reorientate
their visitors. The simplest and most residual way in which this can
be accomplished is for the visitors to be directed to recognize all the
elements of the natural world without having those elements either
transformed or distorted in the process. Yet if such a minimal design strategy is successful, the danger will be that nobody notices
the garden at all, and the message will be lost in the medium. This
was, and still is, one of the greatest challenges either for designers
who opt to work within the strict restraints of ecological purism
or for any garden-maker working within the tradition of the English landscape garden, as Finlay himself did for more than 40 years.
By the second half of the eighteenth century it was generally held
that gardens and parks should simply present or represent the
best of Nature (often capitalized) without cluttering her (she was
invariably feminine) with meretricious art. In this effort Capability Brown was deemed to be the supreme artist, though his
rivals (politically motivated, it is true) criticized his work for being
no different from the common elds. Indeed, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
himself no advocate of landscape gardening, remarked in his
thirteenth Discourse that Gardening, as far as Gardening is an Art,
or entitled to that appellation, is a deviation from nature; for if the
true taste consists, as many hold, in banishing every appearance
of Art, or any traces of the footsteps of man, it would then no
longer be a garden. Today, many who frequent places like Prospect
Park in Brooklyn or Hyde Park in London fall into the same trap
by assuming that these are just natural landscapes; this no doubt
partly explains why the profession of landscape architecture can
be so invisible in comparison with that of architecture.
Finlay specically acknowledges this dilemma of gardenmakers and landscape architects. He hails Capability Brown both
135
for his artistic achievements and the tact with which they were
accomplished: a bench at Little Sparta is inscribed in ways that
addresses this garden history Brown made water appear as Water,
and lawn as Lawn. Here we have a reversal of the Luton exedra that
asked for capitals to be given lower-case letters; Brown is celebrated
for his skill in abstracting from the given materials and so augmenting their potential. There is also perhaps in Finlays aphorism
a nostalgia for the simplicity with which such transformations seem
to be accomplished, and even more for the acuity of mind that
would recognize them. We look at things too often without seeing
them, until somehow they are brought sharply into focus. So a
pebble is only a pebble until Finlay engraves upon it,16 or a moorland scenery beside a loch isnt to be noticed as picturesque until
that word on a sloping fence-rail suggests that it might be. Some of
Finlays most engaging work as a garden-maker consists of these
minimal hints by which we gain more, larger understanding; it perhaps also explains his objection to the heavy-handed insertions
of sculpture in attempts to beef up the otherwise unmediated
world of nature.
14 Mower is Less
silenzio dopo il chiacchiero
(silence after chatter)
Once we have quickly acknowledged the wit of Finlays 1973 upending of Mies van der Rohes dictum that less is more, what exactly
are we to make of it? Maybe it should just be accepted as a clever
one-liner, except we know that Finlay can usually be more demanding than that. In which case, it provokes two reections: one revolves
around the apparent reversal of Miess minimalism, the other
around the punning substitution of mower for more.
Mower, rst. By itself, without benet of commentary or gloss,
it suggests that by the action of the lawnmower, the grass is lessened (cf. A lawn is by no means mere short grass1). Yet it could
also imply that the lawnmower does less, or less interesting things,
than other garden tools and activities. Here it may be saying, which
knowledge of Finlay would support as an interpretation, that as a
tool of the suburban gardener the mower results in far less interesting gardens; that the purchase of such a machine at the garden
centre is all you need to become a gardener; that the machine (or
now the person pushing it the mower him- or herself) is somehow less efcient, less strenuous, less subtle, but (above all) less
involved because simply intervening mechanically.
130 Mower is Less,

1973, card.
137
As regards Mies, Finlays reversal of the dictum that less is more

might seem to imply a refusal of minimalism, at least in certain cases
(for we have nonetheless seen that he can indeed cleave to a modernist or Spartan austerity at times). Thus while for Mies less was
more, that more, for Finlay, is even less. Suppose the mower is slave
to the lowest common denominator of suburban gardening and its
machinery; it follows that the gardenist whom Finlay would, by contrast, endorse is going to do more and to make much more use in
his landscapes of art and even Miess despised ornament. Playing
against Mies, Finlay might further imply that one strong characteristic streak of gardening folk is their abhorrence of a vacuum (which
we know that nature, if not modern architecture, abhors); he himself has lled certain parts of Little Sparta with a density of both
planting and sculptural insertions in ways that suggest he could not
abide Miess advice. Finally, the aphorism may take ironical pleasure in humbling the gardener (the mower), garden-making and
landscape architecture before the giant of architecture.
All or none of the above may apply. The clever phrase certainly
suggests that Finlay takes gardening seriously, and we could readily apply any one of the plausible implications of the phrase to
elements in his garden art, depending on what aspect we wished
to emphasize. But one other possibility seems to offer more scope
for getting a handle on Finlays ideas and practice. In the midseventeenth century Andrew Marvell had four of his poems speak
through the mouth of a Mower, whom we might suppose to be an
agricultural worker, mowing in the elds at hay time and harvest
(true, scythes must have been used to keep grass less on bowling
greens and similar garden areas). But one of the poems in particular, The Mower Against Gardens, does imply that the eponymous
mower is somebody who dislikes gardens: Tis all enforced, the
fountain and the grot, / While the sweet elds do lie forgot. He
attacks Luxurious man for his corruption of nature . . . most
plain and pure, for diverting streams into dead and standing pools
within gardens, for egregiously cultivating and above all engaging
in the artice of grafting. In particular the Mower derides the fashion for garden statues when the gods of the meadows (fauns and
faeries) are neglected:
Their statues, polished by some ancient hand,
May to adorn the gardens stand:
But howsoeer the gures do excel
The gods themselves with us do dwell.
138
mower is less
While it is hard to know how we should take the Mower as Marvells spokesman, he does have a strong case to make, more in
keeping with Finlays celebration of Arcady and its inhabitants,
and not unlike Blakes harsh rebuke to those who could emptily
symbolize or rationalize away genius loci. One thing that Marvells
Mower may well be doing is taking a swipe at the sophisticated
Renaissance garden art imported into England from Italy by the
later seventeenth century, which scepticism parallels Finlays own
neo-classical rearmament as applied to gardens. Certainly the piety
of The Mowers hymn to willing nature [that] does to all dispense
/ A wild and fragrant innocence climes with Finlays rebuttal of
contemporary secularism and his need to reconnect gardens to
ancient virtues and beliefs. The pithy, if subverted, re-vision of
Mies, as well as its possible rebuttal of a totalizing modernism,
gibes well with the laconic stance of Finlays neo-classicism. The
terseness is Spartan, not obviously self-indulgent, holding itself
back, like the concrete poem.
The Mies-derived aphorism works like so much of Finlays art
that draws or relies upon aspects of concrete poetry, especially when
they are called upon to act in landscapes: the insertion is as slight
as possible, yet the impact is large. Mower [more] is less suggests
that the garden and its artists and technicians, working with the
simplest interventions, can achieve huge results in small ways. Art
is a small adjustment, says the embroidered inscription on a lambswool scarf that Finlay sent out as a Christmas present in 2001, and
the opposite corner of the scarf is sown back to show us what is
meant.2 It is even sometimes as the Luton panels dedicated to
the Errata of Ovid made clear just a question of adjusting the
capitalization of crucial words (illus. 117), a process he sees as
being the best way to understand the talent of Capability Brown.
If, however, we are tempted, despite the Brownian example in
English landscaping, to think of garden-making as elaborate and
probably expensive earth-moving, transplantations and trips to the
garden centre, then some more modest vernacular traditions, too,
can change our minds. Finlays frequent recourse to sundials and
benches is typical of the possibilities he can garner from ordinary,
simple effects (illus. 536, 1512). Other items not necessarily associated with garden architecture are also grist to his mill: he has
introduced stiles into Little Sparta (illus. 45 and 46) and Fleur de
lAir, and one of the latest sectors of the former now includes an
English lane that does not, as expected, waste time or space by
139
140 mower is less
meandering (illus. 47). His fondness for working in found olive

plantations, in woodland groves (the Domaine de Kerguhennec
in Brittany3), in churchyards (St Georges, Bristol), in allotments
(now at Little Sparta) or in public parks is further demonstration
of his reliance upon the obvious virtues of vernacular gardening.
And such ordinary sites and everyday insertions, unlike mythological apparatus, are much more likely to attract a broader range
of visitors.
Finlays gardens work variously to attack or ambush their visitors, and certainly simple and self-evident devices by no means
constitute his only design technique. His inscriptions run the
gamut from clear to gnomic. But many require in fact only small
adjustments, both in the item itself and especially in our response
to it. Some even have a negligible impact if one chooses to pass
them by, but others can be resonant, intriguing or shocking if we
stop and attend to the puns, word play, conundrums and other
sleights of grammar and epigraphy. Yet he has made it exceptionally clear that narratives are not part of any garden repertoire,
just as he has gone so far as to imagine even the elimination of
the inscription An inscription need not actually exist in the
landscape; if it is in the consciousness of the viewer it is in the
landscape. That will comfort those who dislike those verbal intrusions. But it signals, surely triumphantly or optimistically, that
Finlay has so expanded the eld of landscape architecture that less
is more after all.
131 A Fleur de lAir stile.
141
15 A solid place
. . . a tangible image of goodness and sanity far from
the now-fashionable poetry of anguish and self
If, in the nal resort, I am still ummoxed by how to take Finlays

verbal revision of the Miesian dictum, it is nonetheless clear that
Finlay took gardens very seriously (but by no means solemnly).
And one reason for this was his condence that they are more
concrete and more secure than other places, well dened in their
physical boundaries and thresholds, and maintaining within their
compounds a civic and cultural certitude. They are part of his need
as he put it to imagine everything in terms of a Solid Place (in
this he said he was like the Greeks1). There is an analogy here with
his condence in concrete poetry, in its usefulness, its refusal of
fuzziness or sloppy sentimentality. Gardens, too, share in this solidity of place, where what you see is what you get and what you
get is what you nd. His promotion of concrete poetry in the letter
to Pierre Garnier as a model of order was preceded by the remark
that it also represents a tangible image of goodness and sanity . . .
far from the now-fashionable poetry of anguish and self . Two
things are important here. One is the insistence on the tangible,
the other, a deliberate refusal to parade the self.
His poetry, whether printed or made in landscape, is neither
solipsist nor egocentric. One sign of Finlays deliberate playing
down of his own role is the constant involvement and acknowledgement of collaborators and associates calligraphers, stone
carvers, sculptors, draughtsmen and women. Everything he does
always incorporates and acknowledges the creative work of others.
Another mode of deecting attention from his own point of view
is the ubiquitous mention of other artists and writers, through
whose imaginations as well as our own we may attend better to the
natural world (e.g., see poussin / hear lorrain, illus. 43). This
is not to say that Finlays own personality does not shine through
or declare itself throughout his uvre (its doubtful that youd
fail to recognize a Finlay piece once you knew something of his
work). Rather, his reluctance to burden work with the personal
and his insistence that the artist is an agent not a subject situate
his work rmly within certain schemes of both neo-classicism and
142
modernism. By distancing himself from an overly personal

stance or dogmatic programme, as in both his concrete poems and
then his detached sentences, Finlay puts aside his self and makes
room for the readers and the visitors share. It is indeed possible
to propose a detailed and seemingly cohesive commentary on
virtually all his garden insertions, based on a thorough acquaintance with his many publications, interviews and then on extensive
collateral reading, all of which could be invoked to determine the
visitors engagement very strictly. But in practice and on the ground
these garden moments also appear arbitrary and our meeting
with them haphazard, and we might even see in such arbitrariness a version of Surrealisms reliance upon chance. The inventions
are his, but they are susceptible to a range of chance interpretations by passers-by who are not any longer Poussins Arcadian
shepherds (let alone Poussins patrons or his modern scholars),
but more likely to be Grays and Gainsboroughs ordinary folk.
The refusal to parade his self means that Finlay inevitably surrenders his creations to the control of others. And this is, of course,
especially true when Finlay has worked in public or semi-public
spaces like Stockwood Park, St Georges Churchyard or the
grounds of the Max Planck Institut. He said it was only professors who worried about the availability of meaning in his landscapes, and professors (it must be confessed) do tend to be much
preoccupied with themselves!
143
132 The grounds of the

Max Planck Institut,
Stuttgart.
133 Ian Hamilton Finlay

in the garden at Little
Sparta.
His remark to Garnier also emphasized the tangible. From a

gardeners perspective, everything is tangible about making and
maintaining a garden digging, weeding, watering, manuring,
transplanting, pruning and pushing the wheelbarrow. We must
not think because one of the Unconnected Sentences reads Flowers in a garden are an acceptable eccentricity that he objects to
them and their cultivation: that adversarial remark challenges
those who think gardens are only composed of owers to enlarge
and engage their interest in other aspects of the garden. The image
that many retain of him from photograph and personal encounter
is, rightly, of him wearing a gardeners essential gear, in his case
Wellington boots (illus. 133). And in his place-making as a whole,
the insistence is for both hands-on horticulture and the solid
presence of sculptural items.
Yet another aspect of this precise and pragmatic world of the
garden is that its limits are dened and the gardeners province
clearly marked out. Fences and the like keep things out, but they
also serve to emphasize whatever is within a gardens specic
province. Seen from a distance across the Pentland hillsides, Little
Sparta is clearly marked by its cluster of green woodland, distinguishing it from the surrounding moorland (illus. 134). And the
immediate approach, up the rough track that gave the original name
to Stonypath, also ensures that visitors register the thresholds across
144
a solid place
134 The stony path

towards Little Sparta,
glimpsed at the
upper right.
135 A column at
Little Sparta.
145
which their visit must be paid a cattle grid, and gates to be

opened and closed behind them. And especially after the War of
Little Sparta, which was a battle precisely to preserve the integrity
of what was inside the garden, a series of closed gates signalled
effectively that the garden was for a time no longer open to the
public; its integrity, though violated, had still to be preserved. For
Christmas of 1996 the Wild Hawthorn Press produced the booklet Three Gates: On the Way to Little Sparta:2 photographs of the
gates by Robin Gillanders recapitulated the experience of that approach one showed the ground leading up to each barrier, a
second the gate itself closed across the track, and a third showed
a detail of the notice posted on each that explained the circumstances of the closure. And once the visitor has gained entrance to
this enclosed and solid place, the boundaries and thresholds continue. The interior of Little Sparta contains many of these liminal
moments gateways, stepping stones, bridges, stiles all of which
are thresholds designed to make the visitors aware of the different
parts and the new experiences that await them in each. These
boundaries contribute to making us recognize the tangible nature
of the garden, for we must deliberately and physically negotiate
them. Nor, once ensconced within the garden, are there lacking
views outwards into the countryside beyond which further
conrm the integrity of its enclosure from which we are looking
(illus. 5, 10, 135).
At Celle, too, Finlay places his homage to ancient traditions of
agriculture at the very point where the parkland gives way to
olive groves; the boundary is quite explicit, though marked by no
tangible structure. The visitors approach to the grove at the
Krller-Mller Museum is channelled through a fairly narrow
opening in the surrounding shrubbery before he or she is able to
emerge in the clearing, around the end of which stand the treecolumns (illus. 145). Fleur de lAir in Provence marks its initial
boundary with two pairs of gateposts, for arriving and departing.
The actual entry into Stockwood Park is deliberately staged so that
visitors negotiate the passageway from the former nineteenthcentury garden and its anthology of Period Gardens, passing
further references to eighteenth-century designed landscapes, and
only then emerge from the close walk to nd themselves in the
new parkland.
Gardening is a very pragmatic, hands-on activity, and the place
where it is pursued will usually have its limits or boundaries implied if not clearly marked off from the surrounding territories
146 a solid place
that do not need such careful and physical attention. And what
Finlay inserts into his gardens are equally crafted carefully and
precisely above all the stonework and its inscriptions and these
contribute to the object-orientated, tangible ambience of a site. Yet
what is striking is how the tangible intersects with the intangible.
Finlay uses the gardens solid place and its impersonal character
to communicate paradoxically matters that are neither susceptible to precise formulation nor fail to bear the unmistakable mark
of his own vision. In this he recapitulates a long-standing need
of much landscape architecture to be recognized as work that
promotes cultural values; put differently, he seeks answers to the
question can gardening and place-making serve ends beyond
their own aesthetic ambitions and physical materiality? Obviously
Finlay, like other gardeners,3 has thought so. The French Revolution and ancient Sparta had seemed to offer him models of solid
places where ideas, ideals and pieties could co-inhabit with and
be expressed through the tangible constructions of society. And so
when he turned to making gardens, he endeavoured to address
cultural, civic and political issues through their own special and
material poetry.
147
16 Gardens matter
I wonder whether poets themselves are aware
of what is happening [in their work] . . . 1
In a poem of 1977 entitled Stonypath (the original name of Finlays house, and therefore of its garden until emended to Little
Sparta in 1983), the distinguished poet and critic Kathleen Raine
addressed its creator:
Here are sunk pool and rising grove of young Aeolian pine,
Wood, water, wind, within your containing image,
Restored to mental space
Which is the worlds true place2
Though she acknowledges the physical elements of the contained
garden, she otherwise moves to make a much more strenuous
claim for Finlays garden and (by extension) his garden art as a
whole. The poem claims that gardens achieve their perfect role in
the imagination, to which claim she adduces the Muslim on his
prayer-mat, the Buddhist monk at Roanje, Carl Jung, Yeats and
Homers Odysseus; yet this truly intellectual identity is also an
actual place, a real stony parcel of Lanarkshire / Where each step,
up or down, [is] hedged by sweet scotch briar. Garden elements
have been restored to their rightful place in the mind; but mental space has also been returned to the garden. Idea and its expressive material are one and indivisible in a garden. Finlay himself
agrees: To me the real is the material which is to embody the idea.3
So, to end, some further unconnected paragraphs must be devoted to both the materiality of Ian Hamilton Finlays gardens and
his ideas, and the true place of both in modern culture. He
brought the idea of the garden and art of garden-making to a perfection and complexity that hold their own, if they do not surpass,
his work in other media.4 And it doesnt matter whether he would
have agreed or not. For when he was interviewed by the Belgian
critic Francis Edeline (who has written with special lucidity about
concrete poetry), Finlay wondered whether poets were ever truly
aware of what they were doing. I take this remark (given above) to
be a poets version of the so-called intentional fallacy: on the one
148
hand a scepticism about whether artists themselves are truly the

best judges or explicators of their own work, and on the other even
a hope that their poetic achievement will outstrip their own best
understanding of its intentions. In which spirit, since Finlay is no
longer here to direct or gauge our responses to his work, it is
necessary to ask what signicance his garden art may hold for the
future. How, as Yeats put it, will Finlays garden poetry continue
to exist stripped of excuse and nimbus and become a Past, subject to Judgment?
Finlay obviously felt passionately about gardens. And, of course,
such enthusiasm is shared by thousands of others who garden and
make gardens. But his passion sought different means of expression from those available to most people, for, in the happy phrase
of Charles Jencks, he tried to take them out of the glare of their
own stereotypes.5 He saw in gardens a revolutionary weapon to
wield against contemporary culture. What mattered to him about
gardens, or perhaps one should say what he held to be the potential
of gardens, consisted of ve things: they could contrive a coherent,
whole world; they could make palpable a preternatural nature; they
are dialectical and transformative; they are experimental spaces;
and, nally, all good gardens renew gardenist traditions for contemporary use and enjoyment.
In one of the best obituaries for Finlay, Tom Lubbock wrote in the
Independent (29 March 2006) that Little Sparta engages with
among other things agriculture, architecture, warfare, the home,
love, gardening, friendship, revolution, music, the organic world,
the sky, the sea, classical mythology and philosophy, Romanticism,
modern art. It practises a sustained and interlocking meditation
on these themes, and continually gives hints of an embracing
world-view. Finlay himself endorsed this view of a garden, being
less a place than a world.6 That Finlays many concerns intersect is
clear, even that they could constitute or hint at a world-view; but
it seems to me (turning his phrase against him) that his gardens
can only be places, where these manifold themes are initiated,
among which visitors will deliberately or unconsciously pick,
choose and make their own connections. Nonetheless, they can
be very special places what the French call hauts lieux (though
high places have nothing to do with their height above sea level).
The model that Finlays garden art offers here is its plenitude of
signicance, its determination not to be mono-vocal or homogeneous, above all not to be one artists poetic self-extensions.7
149
136 Proposal for a

Monument to JeanJacques Rousseau, 1986,
with Gary Hincks.
A further way in which it is useful to understand the world of

a garden like Little Sparta is to realize that we are asked to see it
through the eyes and minds of the many other artists and writers
whose names are cited and whose obiter dicta are quoted there
extensively. Finlay asks his visitors to think of Nicolas Poussin,
Claude Lorrain, Albrecht Drer, J. Corot, among other painters;
to recall Virgil, Henry Vaughan, Rousseau and a host of British
authors, including John Clare. We see or hear his gardens through
the eyes and music of these other artists, just as the garden in
Provence offered Ovid, Goethe, Petrarch or Homer as our guides.
Visitors augment their own perspectives, as Finlay did his, by drawing upon the imaginations of many predecessors, though without
sacricing their own responsibilities and perception. In 1986, for
instance, Finlay made a proposal for a monument to Jean-Jacques
Rousseau (illus. 136) that took the form of an urn inserted into
the pastoral scenery of a park; but this urn existed only as an empty
shape given form by two marble walls, in the middle of which was
a conspicuous void that visitors would recognize as outlining a
classical urn a very modernist and minimalist gesture in such
a lush landscape. Of this experience Finlay noted, in one of his
familiar formulations, that what we see through the empty space
is nature, whereas Rousseau saw it idealized and classicized as
Nature. But it is also, as a built work and without Finlays commentary, an invitation for visitors to occupy that large space between
nature and Nature with their own thoughts.8
150 gardens matter
Another way of appreciating the signicance of this plenitude

and range of meanings in his garden worlds is to remember how
Finlays designs always bring the immediate, the near and the local
into dialogue with the distant, the far and the universal. The garden becomes the place-holder of much that lies outside its bounds.
This is both a literal and a metaphorical manoeuvre. References to
the sea, to revolutions, to historical events and other landscapes
inhabit all his sites. But at Little Sparta he also contrived a whole
series of gardens or garden spaces, each of which manifests a different handling of its natural materials and its cultural insertions
there are the closed and tightly spaced gardens, gardens that
invoke in miniature Italian Renaissance villas, woodland gardens,
landscapes around ponds or set against the near hills and adjacent
elds, kitchen gardens (the Scots kailyard) and allotments, and in
the English parkland an area the openness of which, as its name
implies, is set off (historically, formally and politically) against the
tauter, more obviously organized spaces of the gardens closer to
the house. Furthermore, the shell of a former barn near the house
will eventually contain a hortus conclusus that Finlay planned
before his death, thus completing the historical register of garden
types, forms and experiences. A world of gardens.
As a poet Finlay celebrated the hierarchies of the word, but
he also practised what may be termed hierarchies of scale and intervention in the land. This takes various forms, but its most
prominent device is the exploration of different ratios of nature
to culture and culture to nature. For while gardens may be considered the most intensive and artful of creations, even they contain
declensions of that human intervention. Sometimes we are presented with dominant artefacts, at other times with an abundance
of water, shrubs, bushes and trees. The whole effect of Little Sparta
is to draw visitors attention to how this dialogue functions in
different areas. Generally, the scale of nature >< culture is more
intensely tilted towards the cultural the closer it is to the house
and adjacent buildings. While Finlay may not literally have created
the garden in this fashion working outwards from the Front,
Roman and Sunk Gardens and the Temple Pool towards the moorland and Lochan where we discover the Saint-Just blocks or towards
the openness of the English Parkland the effect is one of a slackening ratio of artice to nature as we move further from the house.
At Fleur de lAir, too, the descending hillside offers its own opportunity to explore a similar scale of intervention: the olive terraces
are less neatly worked as we descend; the manipulation of basic
151
137 Edge of the Temple

Pool, Little Sparta.
138 The English Parkland, Little Sparta.
152 gardens matter
139 The bridge at Fleur

de lAir.
140 The trellised,

wooden pergola, inter
artes et naturum,
at Little Sparta.
153
ingredients of the natural world like water change dramatically

from the swimming pool beside the house, to a vernacular water
cistern midway down the slope, to the muddy puddle where boar
wallow at the very bottom. Rousseau, the lover of nature, greets us
with a resigned face at the foot of the site, as does Odysseus oar,
far inland from the sea.
Yet Finlay rarely allows the scale to tip too far in either direction.
At Fleur de lAir it is precisely down in those wilder parts, before
the terrain is entirely taken over by wilderness, that we discover a
fantastic modern bridge spanning a ravine (illus. 139): its glass and
steel curve, braced against the hillside and with only a single
handrail on the inner side, is an astonishing paean to human invention and intervention, yet poised over an untouched chasm. In
parallel fashion at Little Sparta, individual garden spaces play with
the collaboration and the tensions between these two elements and
the different modes of their resolution: Didos Grotto, built of
rough stones and with a roof of grasses, has a smooth keystone.
The high and open moorland above the Lochan has its insertions
carefully attuned to their context: the huge and unnished SaintJust blocks, the dry-stone walls, the Lochan itself, and the raw
columns and thatched roof of the geese hut (illus. 41 and 141).
Down in the parkland Finlay set one of his works that specically
addressed the joint contributions of nature and art: the piece, Inter
Artes et Naturam, is a complex three-dimensional trellis forming a
miniature crossroads through which, as the visitor passes between
its sections, both worked planes of wood and stripped, but unshaped branches are revealed (illus. 140). The concept of various
collaborations between (inter) art and nature is made suddenly
palpable, no longer a linguistic clich or abstraction.9
Stockwood Park, too, offers its own commentary on this central
aspect of garden art. Where so much of the site was given and could
not, as at Stonypath, be shaped completely ex nihilo, Finlay still manages, as we have seen, to lead the park-goer through a sequence of
garden spaces that are both historical and formal. Different versions
of how to handle the forms of the garden walled nineteenthcentury, emblematic eighteenth-century, and open, but modied,
parkland beyond an extract of a ha-ha effectively shape how we
respond to each. By their ensemble shall you know each of them,
yet their options do not dictate a preference for one over another.
In this representation of scale within the whole world of a garden, Finlay is translating old ideas into current practice. When
some sixteenth-century humanists tried to explain the exciting
154
gardens matter
new world of Renaissance gardens and gardening, it involved understanding that this activity occupied some sort of a climax in
human colonization of land: there was, in the beginning, a pristine
world of nature, inhabited by the gods and wild men, pockets of
which still survived; after which and in which humans then settled
and established themselves with agriculture, towns, roads, harbours
and bridges, before (so the narrative went) rening their cultural
interventions even further to the extent that they created gardens
or what was dubbed a third nature.10 It was a third, because it had
to be seen as the climax of that increasing human mastery of the
natural world; many later gardens were laid out in effect, if not by
intention, to reveal the fashion in which the elaborate organization
of spaces near a mansion diminished and dwindled across orchards
and elds until it nally reached the bare hillsides.
Not surprisingly, when Finlay resumes this old idea, it is given a
new twist. At both ends of Little Sparta as visitors approach it rst
and then at the furthest edge of the grounds are two admonitions
that concern the relationship of the garden to the landscape out of
which it has been created. After climbing the stony track that leads
from the public road, visitors must close the penultimate gate into
the grounds, and while doing so they look back to where they have
come from and at the same time read on the inside of the gate das
gepgte Land . the uted land (illus. 142). Then, at the far edge
of the property, visitors come upon a series of dry-stone walls, at
rst sight in the form of a sheepfold, but upon closer inspection
155
141 The Goose Hut,

Little Sparta.
142 The inscription on

the inside of the gate at
the entrance to Little
Sparta (das gepgte
Land . the uted land).
143 The walls inscribed

for little fields and
long horizons at Little
Sparta.
these are open at the sides and set out as six segments of longer
walls. On the pieces of wall are inserted six inscriptions that read
from left to right across the gap through which we walk to read the
second and third lines (illus. 143):
little fields
long horizons
little fields long for horizons
horizons long
for little fields
At this point the visitors have walked through the garden to
emerge on this high point; the alley-way between the walls now
directs their attention to elds and fells, a longer horizon than anything we have experienced since entering Little Sparta.
What these two as it were, bracketing encounters contrive
at the beginning and end of a visit is to make the experience of the
156 gardens matter
garden more complex because of its relationship with the territory

beyond. Not that the immediate landscape of the Pentland Hills is
at all wild, for nothing in western Europe has remained a rst
nature, untouched by humans. But it does appear and indeed is
different from Little Sparta itself, and appreciating the scale of
intervention or human activity in different parts of a landscape is
an ineluctable aspect of our response to gardens. Thus, the uted
land at one level simply nudges us to note the forms of ploughed
land or the folds of the terrain; the German adds two further associations gepgte may sound like a version of uted but it actually
means cared for, while Land may contain our English word land
but in German also signies a politically dened territory. So
the vision of elds beyond the closed gate stimulates an understanding of different ways in which land is used by humans; and,
of course, the sound of the ute announces the entrance to Pans
demesne of Arcady. The other encounter at the far end of Little
Sparta imagines the longing of one landscape element for its opposite little enclosures yearn for wide-open spaces, and innite
distance seeks local denition. We need the two so as to understand the full signicance of each. Both have been allowed here:
the smaller, tighter spaces of the garden have emerged onto the
open moorland, but the expanse of moorland has itself been compacted and compartmentalized in the making of Little Sparta.
This is also a matter of scale between eld and horizon. Scale
always involves being able to draw comparisons, and Finlays gardens play endlessly with changes in scale in order to stimulate their
visitors to connect the compact world of gardens with the larger
landscape of the world in which they are made.11 Apollos golden
head is huge; the conning tower of the nuclear submarine smaller
than wed expect. Finlay tests physical and metaphysical limits and
boundaries enclosure, horizons, boundless seas, extreme violence,
the sacred by asking his visitors to register, and often adjust, the
scales by which they habitually assess ideas and spaces. He himself
was acutely conscious of scale, and while he seems to have enjoyed
a remarkable intuition of how it could be deployed, on one interesting occasion he apparently realized that he had got it wrong.
Beside the Lochan he once erected an open-sided temple dedicated
to Apollo;12 but he soon came to realize that in two respects the
scale was quite wrong it was too overbearing on the site, and it
was too elaborate an architecture for an area that, as weve already
seen, is characterized more by its rough and rugged insertions. So
the temple was removed, to nd subsequently its ideal setting in
157
the woodland of the much larger private estate near Edinburgh

(illus. 144), where the golden inscription around the inside of the
dome acquired an unexpectedly fresh resonance: apollo a god
definitely in exile, it reads in part, a claim that its distance
from the original location at Little Sparta underscores.
When Jorge Luis Borges wrote Music, states of happiness,
mythology, faces belaboured by time, certain twilights and certain
places, [which] try to tell us something, or have said something
we should not have missed, or are about to say something, he
was offering a denition of the aesthetic phenomenon.13 He
might just as well have been describing the experience of a Finlay landscape which is indeed aesthetic, if by that we mean
something well conceived, beautifully coherent in its own way and
with a form that itself speaks to us. But the word aesthetic tends
to have a bad press among contemporary landscape architects, who
see only its least strenuous claim of something being beautiful or
even just pretty. From such empty self-indulgence (Observing the
elegance of Circes hair / Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials14),
Finlay moves garden poetry to a more solid place. The gardens
that he makes reintroduce a very secular society to the lost pieties
or sacredness of nature (piety was always an ingredient of culture
. . . Without piety nothing can be understood15). This is not a
matter of hugging trees or other forms of ecological zeal. Rather,
what the experience of a garden can do is to enlarge our grasp
of our place in the world, historically and spatially, physically and
metaphysically. Sundials, after all, are beautiful examples of an
environmental art.16
Finlay essentially challenged his contemporaries to nd a place
in their lives for garden art beyond pleasant retreat, sentimental
enclave or horticultural haven. His own method, in even the most
limited interventions, was to instil spaces with different kinds of
meaning, to materialize ideas, some of which would complement
each other and suggest a whole greater than the sum of their parts,
while others would stand alone or even seem contradictory. The
onus is then on the garden visitor to make something of these
provocations, to grasp their paradoxes or their connections: of
which the interchange between art and nature is one, the role of
time and tide in garden art another, and the mixture of violent
with benign in the natural world a third. One visitor will abbreviate the garden, another enlarge it. To one, it is the entertainment
of ten minutes, to another the meditation of a day.17
158
gardens matter
144 The re-sited Apollo

Temple, in woodland in
the grounds of a private
house in Scotland.
159
By enlarging the garden, Finlay anticipates that certain visitors

will not be content with what he calls the fussy particulars of modern gardening, but rather discover the grave generalizations of
classical gardens. So much contemporary production of public
open space is simply about planting or amenities jogging paths
and play areas, for instance; there is nothing wrong with any of
these, but to keep design at that level is to neglect the hierarchies of
space to which people probably wish to have more access than
much public open-space design allows them. Equally, designs that
feel an obligation to move somehow beyond mere practicalities,
but do so by devising only ingenious gimmicks or one-liners, have
failed to invest their work with any true diversity of signicance.
We bring into gardens whatever resources we have acquired
personally and as members of a given culture and society. Gardens
in their turn must be devised to welcome that diversity and yet to
augment it. Finlays gardens try to do so in contrast to the bland
and unstrenuous demands of municipal parkland that assumes
the lowest possible denominator of attention. Not everybody will
be able, or even want, to respond to a design by saying, as one critic
has done, that the way in which the trees [in the grove at the
Krller-Mller] afrm their vertical quality recalls what Heidegger says of the eruption of phusis achieved by the intervention of
techne.18 There are other responses, other formulations of the experience of Finlays tree columns, and other recollections (recall
is a highly personal, not to say often casual, affair). His landscapes
offer this more exible model: dense and richly conceived out of
an intense and autodidactic imagination, his installations provide
endless opportunities for others to nd in them associations, ideas,
145 The Sacred Grove

at the Krller-Mller
Museum, Otterlo.
160 gardens matter
messages and even injunctions for direct action. Some of these will
be in tune with what Finlay himself might have explained; others
will be modied in the guts of the living, and transformation was
one of Finlays special pleasures!
There will clearly be, as with the responses to much of the
world around us (and not just its arts), hierarchies of response.
We may abbreviate a garden or enlarge upon it. While it may
generally be agreed that the more we can get out of an experience, the fuller and richer our lives will be, that is not to say that
there is no value in small beginnings. It has been a central argument here that different visitors bring different expectations and
resources (cultural, intellectual, emotional) into a Finlay landscape and that some of his most striking ideas allow a variety of
responses: Apollo and Daphne, the Picturesque, would be examples of moments where an appreciation of what is before us
is almost certainly incremental, on site and later in retrospection.
Furthermore, we can have experiences and yet lack the means
to articulate them to ourselves or to others: in the grove at the
Krller-Mller what we intuit might coincide with what Heidegger explained but still lack the vocabulary to explain it. One
of Finlays major efforts in his garden poetry has been to extend
our vocabulary all those redenitions, quotations, games with
words in order that we may enjoy a fuller response by being
able to explain it.
Nonetheless, Finlays garden poetry provides opportunities
for us to enjoy an enlarged apprehension without requiring it.
Sometimes he seems to belittle his garden poetry, as when he
explained that his real achievement was to organize bits of landscape and things, make good compositions out of grass, trees,
owers and artefacts.19 I suspect that stance is deliberately taken
up so as to allow visitors the freedom to abbreviate his landscapes; but it does not mean he is not also eager for them to enlarge upon them. He would have strenuously opposed an attitude
that was brutally articulated by the American land artist Robert
Smithson, who asked, Could one say that art degenerates as it
approaches gardening? and almost certainly expected the answer
yes.20 Finlay wanted and promoted a thoroughgoing art of the
garden. He was concerned for the natural elements, good gardener
that he was, adept at planting, transplanting and making things
grow (I suspect better than most if not all of his commentators,
this one included). And at the same time he wanted that material
world to become the expression of what can best be called the
161
preternatural, what the dictionary denes as outside the ordinary course of nature, though still in touch with it.21 This was
the garden revolution he proposed.
Finlays characteristic manoeuvre, above all in his garden art, was
to transform places and our responses to place through a dialectical process, by presenting contrasts and opposites for garden visitors
to fathom and perhaps resolve: a double insistence upon gardenings practicalities and its pieties; the insistence on the violence
of nature and on its benecent aspects, along with a deliberate
concern to redeem that idea from the infecting taint of Nazism;22
playful collisions of word and image or form and content; the
deployment of the fragment to entice us into more complete appreciations; the very act of sculptural or poetic insertions where
we would not expect them; above all, the wonderful tension between the highly personal idiom of every one of his works and the
insistence upon collaboration that removes [the work] from the
area of self-expression.23 This collaboration extends, too, from his
working with other craftspeople to his wish to involve people in
responding to the places he has made. To insist that certain gardens
were attacks not retreats was itself part of that overall strategy: we
are meant sometimes to ght back and say: Yes, the provocation
is stimulating and I enjoy it, but I also just enjoy being in this
garden for a while, and Im going to take it at my own pace. So
arguably there is some need to resist the categorical and totalizing
claim, appealing as it has become to those who like to quote it,
about garden attacks for, as Finlay himself must have realized,
attacks even by the local sheriff may be resisted successfully, for
a while.
The dialogues or exchanges in his landscapes are played out
most obviously in our constant apprehension of how nature and
art work together or at times in opposition to make gardens there
is never a nal commitment to one mode over another, neither
Brown nor Le Ntre. But Finlay enjoyed pursuing the possibilities
of contradiction and paradox, both verbally and in garden practice. One of the aphorisms on exile reads that Common sense
approves garden sundials; we exile reason when we descend to
dandelion-clocks;24 its humour lightly camouages his deep attention to time as both the immediate element in which all gardens
must exist and the long cultural continuum in which our historical imagination ourishes (sundials, like church bells, were once
the available time-pieces).
162 gardens matter
146 The Woodland

163
164 gardens matter
147 The front garden at

Little Sparta.
Perhaps his two most provocative design strategies have been,

rst, to engage so energetically in theorizing about the garden,
which most people think of as a practical activity and even hobby,
and, second, his use of inscriptions in his gardens and garden
proposals. For the best part of a century since probably the heyday of Picturesque theorists around and just after 1800 garden
designers have been largely indifferent to conceptual matters, while
much preoccupied with horticultural expertise and practical matters of form. Even todays professional landscape architecture is
largely wary of theorizing or else practises it with meagre historical perspectives and a large dose of unpalatable jargon imported
from outside the eld. Finlay has been quite the opposite, in two
respects: he does pronounce frequently and in general terms upon
the art of gardening, but he does not indulge in lengthy or pretentious expositions (any more than to narratives or sustained
iconography in a garden). His unconnected sentences on various aspects of gardening, including remarks made in interviews,
are nonetheless a mine of conceptual thinking, the implications
of which have largely still to be unpacked by those who design
and think about gardens. He himself meditated long and hard
about the traditions of gardening and their possible modern
reincarnations, and his practice has been fuelled by what was
clearly omnivorous reading encouraged both by his own personal
inclination as an autodidact and by the recommendations of close
colleagues. Finlays theoretical positions are trenchant, but to
people expecting weighty discourse they seem disarming in the
way they are proffered; while to those who never think about what
gardening might mean, they are both redundant and an affront.
The other discursive provocation is Finlays reliance upon inscriptions in his built work. It is to this that Lucius Burckhardt
pointed when he argued vigorously that By using words, Finlay
has brought about the revival of the art of gardening.25 This, of
course, begs a couple of questions: whether indeed there is a revival in garden-making that may be attributed to Finlays example
(an almost impossible question to answer, though the increase in
garden-making and garden culture in the second half of the
twentieth century was phenomenal), and whether the verbal supplements, touted by Burckhardt, are really an integral part of a
garden vocabulary. Inscriptions were, it is true, a feature of many
gardens in the Renaissance and afterwards, and outside western
traditions the inscription is held in special esteem, in, for example,
Chinese culture.26 So Finlays recourse to this device has obvious
165
historical precedents, as well as being sustained by biographical

explanations (his move out of concrete poetry into the garden).
But most landscape architects that I know would not agree
that words are an integral part of a garden vocabulary, let alone part
of its syntax. Finlays (for them, excessive) reliance on words does
not advance garden and landscape design: they are too literary,
and too uncompromisingly hortatory (they require the visitor to
respond to their agenda). To the last charge, it is surely possible
to say that visitors can respond or not to the inscriptions, many
of which are designed to play a palpably formal role markings
upon differently shaped stones (illus. 35, 57, 99, 148) before they
assume some discursive role in the interpretation of the garden.
Then again it could be argued further that the human brain is
structured to cope with both the verbal and the visual, and that
to insist upon addressing both (for the use of words does not preclude looking!) is to afrm a more complete response to an art
form that Finlay (rightly) sees as much unvalued in contemporary society. But his reliance upon words in his gardens logical
as it may seem from the perspective of a concrete poet searching
for new opportunities outside the printed page really disturbs
landscape architects. So why is it so disturbing, perhaps even
threatening to them? One reason is that words necessarily make
people think; they actually say things to passers-by an apparently
unheard-of intrusion into the mental space of those who just love
being in nature. A more substantial objection to verbal supplements
in the designed landscape comes from the modernist dedication
to rely only upon the inherent elements of any given medium
paintings, for instance, are about a at surface and the arrangement
of pigment on it, not about a story or event out there beyond the
canvas. In the same way, modernist landscape architecture is required to observe a similar purism and work its designs entirely
with materials deemed indigenous to it: earth and plants and the
interconnecting structures that are naturally theirs. One of Finlays
ambitions is therefore simply to disabuse landscapists of that
minimalist urge and to remind them of the longer traditions of
place-making, where design vocabulary has drawn upon more
than those basic and natural elements. Mower can still be less.
Finlays gardens are always experimental. Little Sparta has been
above all a place where he could re-examine ideas and visions that
had earlier been explored in other, usually printed, media; equally,
it could give a home to works made for temporary exhibition
166 gardens matter
148 Tree plaque with text

from Virgils 10th Eclogue,
outside the Serpentine
Gallery, Hyde Park,
London.
elsewhere. It also mattered because it was there that Finlay started

to garden. From one tree and a scattering of derelict buildings, it
has expanded year by year, segment by segment, insertion after
insertion, until it is today an astonishing collection of gardens or
garden modes. It was the laboratory where he could experiment
and from where he could transfer designs sometimes, translated
and maybe their errata rectied into many other private and
public sites like Fleur de lAir and Stockwood Park, into parkland
that, while privately owned, is open to the public (Max Planck
Institut, Krller-Mller), and in garden festivals. He is further
represented in collections where his sculptures depend heavily
upon their insertion in specic landscapes (the Forest of Dean
Sculpture Trail, the Serpentine Gallery, Celle, San Diego, St Georges
Churchyard in Bristol, and quite a few German sites); in addition,
there are a variety of urban installations in both Glasgow and
167
149 The stile installed

as part of the Glasgow
Garden Festival, 1988.
Edinburgh.27 His whole uvre nds him returning again and again
to certain themes and issues, but always with the aim of nding
new ways to express them or envisage their potential impact.
That he deliberately occupied an ambiguous zone between modernism and neo-classicism is also part of his concern to experiment.
Obviously, he must be viewed as occupying an important place in
one of modernisms most vital developments, concrete poetry. But
almost certainly when he turned his attention to garden-making
he would have discovered that this particular activity had largely
ignored, or been unable to nd its own niche in, modernism; that
was therefore a task he set himself. Modernism, however, had always
prided itself on its secularism, so he could hardly embrace it
wholeheartedly. Some of its terseness, its minimalism, its Spartan
stance, recalled neo-classicism in landscape painting and gardens
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in Revolutionary
politics at the end of the eighteenth century, and he was drawn to
how these historical neo-classicisms aspired to create a new cultural modernity. When he claimed that I dont feel a distance
between myself and the [neo-]classical,28 he was setting out how
much coincidence he saw between modernism and neo-classicism.
Nonetheless, his engagement with the neo-classical was always
coloured by an equally strong sense of estrangement from the
classical,29 especially as it was often caricatured in garden designs
and architectural follies during the later twentieth century.30 What
he wrote to Suzanne Pag the year before the exhibition of his work
that she organized at the Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris
in 1987 was in effect another set of unconnected sentences, now
168
gardens matter
150 Public seating

in Hunter Square,
Edinburgh, 1996. Plaques
in the seat-backs provide
Finlayesque redefinitions
of the sculptured
redcurrant, pear, olive
and nut, with citations
from poetry and prose.
on neo-classicism; virtually all of them vaunt the revolutionary

force of neo-classicism, its withholding itself from the classical,
and the espousal of virtue rather than beauty.31 They reveal implicitly how much it pleased Finlay to explore how modernism and
neo-classicism could cohabit.
In the nal resort the claim that Finlay is to be counted, as he
must, among the very few innovative garden-makers of our time
will rest upon his condent renewal of gardenist traditions for
contemporary use and enjoyment, upon assertions that certain
classical gardens like Stourhead were a stimulus to continuing
work. Other modern artists and writers have seen the same need,
like Borges, or T. S. Eliot, who creatively remade the texts and
traditions they inherited. Czanne, too, famously remarked that
he wanted to make nature over again after Poussin. Finlay (who
adapted Czannes remark for an exhibition of his own in 198081)
wanted to make gardens over again after (in particular) Shenstone
and Girardin. If the remaking is timely, the preposition after nevertheless signals an inevitable belatedness, as well as something done
in the manner, though without slavish copying, of another artist.
Finlays knowledge of earlier gardening was considerable, if occasionally eccentric. He would deploy traditional strategies, latch
on to devices and ideas from the past, and turn them to his own
purposes. Learning that some Renaissance gardens deployed stone
ships and boats (Villa dEste, Villa Lante) fuelled his own concern
to extend such imagery into his own garden. Inscriptions would
be another crucial example: while earlier gardens had included
169
engraved words, Finlay sees them as insertions (the word implies

intrusion) provocations by virtue both of what they might individually say and of their being generally located where modern
garden visitors would not expect to nd them. He used words to increase the spaces of his gardens the discovery of some inscribed
artefact seems to enlarge even the tightest areas of Little Sparta. They
extend our understanding of the natural surroundings, attuning us
to the sounds, textures and smells of the surrounding landscape as
well as to the crafting of the garden. In particular, the repetition of
some insertion in different situations and sites encourages our alertness to the various applications of a central idea or commonplace.
In his reliance upon the fragment and his play with exactly
how visitors can respond, Finlay also draws upon and reworks
earlier garden theory and practice. The reliance upon fragment
is, of course, a post-Enlightenment phenomenon by no means
exclusively identied with garden art. Finlay had been much interested in several German Romantic writers (the Schlegels,
Novalis, Hlderlin), to whom several items at Little Sparta refer,
and for whom the fragment and the fragmentary were almost an
obsession.32 But the fashion in which gardens have used their own
resources to signal a larger world outside their boundaries lent
considerable authority to the practice of such partial references,
of using parts to speak for wholes.
Dragons sport in a fountain at the Villa dEste, Tivoli; some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century visitors might have appreciated
the conceit that these legendary beasts, guardians of the golden
apples in the Garden of the Hesperides but subdued by Hercules,
are now guarding the precious gardens of the Este family, one of
whose members is named after that mighty labourer. Others might
perhaps enjoy the fashion in which the gushing water, fractured in
the sunlight, seems to bring the stone dragons alive. And during
the huge explosion of garden-making across Europe by the end of
the eighteenth century such differing responses to fragments, or
what Finlay calls excerpts, came to be hailed, even codied, as a
progression from learned emblematic structures in gardens to more
modern, democratic and exible modes that catered for personal
and expressive responses.33 It is typical of Finlay that he refuses
such a limiting distinction, rather exploiting simultaneously both
the emblematic and the expressive in gardens: the emblem is invoked
for its learned and sometimes precise meanings, while allowing it
also a less dened expressive power; or, conversely, arranging for
the expressive potential of a site to carry emblematic meaning.
170 gardens matter
Of the many ways in which Finlay appropriated earlier traditions

none is more crucial than both his deployment of mythology and,
especially, of the idea and practice of genius loci. The mythotopography of Arcadia combines the two. In his essay on Myth
Today, Roland Barthes explains it as a type of speech, a system of
communication; it is not dened by the object of its message, but
by the way in which it utters this message: there are formal limits
to myth, there are no substantial ones.34 Finlay deploys his various mythical landscapes (Arcady, Poussin, Revolutionary France,
battleelds, the ocean), along with both their dramatis personae
(Pan, Apollo, Saint-Just, Rousseau) and their machinery (panzers,
shing-boat names, hand-grenades), not as an invitation for them
to be imitated or merely reproduced, not as substantive things;
but rather as a language to communicate themes lost to immediate sight in our modern world. He makes no pretence of re-creating
Arcady, or representing oceans, or resuming the use of the Revolutionary calendar: his landscapes use them as metaphors for
modern rearmament.
The most important of those themes is probably the notion of
genius loci, which combines the very practical and physical understanding of a place with some preternatural apprehension of
its meaning or signicance: otherwise called the spirit of place. In
each of Finlays major landscape interventions Stockwood Park,
Celle, St Georges in Bristol, the Max Planck Institut, Fleur de lAir
the topography, the local horticultural and cultural situation, the
future users and the existing and potential meaning of the site were
all given equal weight with the less tangible ideas that could be
connected with them. This is the more astonishing, when we remember that Finlay worked from a distance, second-hand, to grasp
the properties of a site. It is not simply a question of changing his
language to suit a new location: though, as Patrick Eyres notes, the
blocks of stone with Saint-Justs words the present order is the
disorder of the future speak in English at Little Sparta, in
Spanish in Barcelona, in French at Jouy-en-Josas and in Dutch in
Eindhoven.35 Rather, it involves a fresh understanding of how a
specic location and culture might receive and interpret an idea
or image transferred into it.
His proposals always involved drawing upon the local particularities of a site to inaugurate and then sustain a design. My
particular talent, Finlay told Paul Crowther, is for making use of
whatever possibility is there36 the bells of Durham Cathedral,
the Portland stone quarry and its adjacency to the English Channel,
171
Shenstones reliance on benches and views, the modern obsession

with Provence, or the new uses of the church of St George, Brandon Hill, Bristol (illus. 151 and 152). On this last site in 2003 was
unveiled a very modest but eloquent installation. The handsome
Georgian building had ceased to be used for religious purposes
and was now a concert hall, mainly for chamber music. It occupies a steeply sloping ground that would be entered equally by
those attending concerts or by those simply taking their leisure
there. Finlay does a simple, even obvious thing and makes both
sorts of visitor aware of the implications of music and song and
their relations with the natural world. Benches, a wall-plaque, a
post and a medallion set into the rear car park are all familiar Finlay devices and are each inscribed: with quotations about songs
from Virgils Eclogues (in both Latin and English), translations
from Janceks letters that do not immediately refer to music, and
a reference to Ovid around the rim of the medallion, girl into
reed: reed into air: air into music, which had earlier appeared
on a tree plaque at Little Sparta. The pole bears Latin words rendered
as then will you and I speak together in unison, while the Jancek
wall-plaque is about planting oaks and carving their trunks with
words I shouted in the air. The insertions are collectively very
modest, the spaces created around them practical for gathering in
small groups, the four benches handy places to rest; but the transformative effect and message for the frequenters of the garden
must be strong. Spirit of place works on those who arrive here,
especially those who arrive without any preconceptions of what
they will nd, to make them more alert to music and to the gardenlike spaces of the old churchyard.
Even Little Sparta may be understood as a rich and complex
response to the place itself: Finlay said that he made it because
the ground was here around the house. And as it grew piecemeal
over the years, each little area was dened by its evolution around
a small artefact, which reigns like a kind of presiding deity or spirit
of the place . . . My understanding is that the work is not the artefact, the work is the whole composition the artefact in its context;
the work . . . is not an isolated object, but an object with owers,
plants, trees, water and so on.37 His instinct for abstraction and
generalities works paradoxically through very specic means,
through the haptic experience of a site; a response to local details
gives access in its turn to the larger world of idea and concept.
And so to a nal paragraph. Over the years Finlays gardens have
been recorded by a number of photographers: Andrew Lawson,
172
gardens matter
151, 152 General views of

St Georges, Brandon Hill,
Bristol.
173
Werner J. Hannappel, Volkmar Herre, Antonia Reeve, Robin

Gillanders, Dave Patterson, among others. And it is through photographs of Little Sparta, for instance, that a majority of people
who know about the garden will have acquired that knowledge.
Indeed, photography has been useful to Finlay himself as a means
of giving his work greater visibility, especially when for one reason
or another it was not easily accessible. Photography, too, served
him in understanding places where he was to intervene but to
which he was unwilling to travel (Technology Epic Convenience
is another of his aphorisms). But his reliance on this most modern
and mechanical form of reproduction goes beyond biographical
or geographical convenience to sustain his programme for neoclassical rearmament. Many important neo-classical gardens were
broadcast through published images: engravings of the Villa dEste,
Popes Twickenham, Shenstones The Leasowes or Ermenonville
rst introduced these special places to many who would never in
fact visit them but to whom they mattered enormously as inspiration and model. Nowadays photography and its contributions to
the coffee-table book have taken up that role to an even greater
extent. Imagery, often combined with text, broadcasts the vision
that created gardens, along with palpable illusions of their physical forms. Finlay, too, established his garden-making within that
tradition, and it serves the same dual purpose. Framed by the camera, the scenes of Finlays landscapes reveal both their sensory
forms and their role as medium for larger ideas and concerns. But
we also need to experience them at rst hand, to appreciate their
various textures and sensuous appeal as well as the complexity of
their metaphysical demands upon us (the ensemble of which he
called the rhetoric of garden spaces in Unconnected Sentences
on Gardening). Gardens matter.
153 Inscribed benches in

small groves overlooking
Lochan Eck at Little
Sparta.
174 gardens matter
175
Appendix
Oblique views of Little Sparta, Lanarkshire

and Fleur de lAir, Provence
by gary hincks
177
178 appendix
179
180 appendix
181
References
Preamble
1 I am not sure that any garden is ever completed, though in his obituary
for Finlay Patrick Eyres said that Little Sparta was complete; Newsletter 79 of
the Garden History Society (Winter 2006), p. 16. Actually, there is still a hortus
conclusus, designed by Finlay before his death, that has yet to be realized.
2 Letter to the author (22 January 1996).
3 The European sites, which constitute by far the largest part of his work,
are mostly illustrated in Works in Europe, 19721995, ed. Zdenek Felix and Pia
Simig (Ostldern, 1995) [with notes in English and German by Harry Gilonis
and introduction by John Dixon Hunt].
4 I am not concerned here, writes Edwin Morgan, with his threedimensional works or with the garden (Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry
and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Alex Finlay, Edinburgh, 1995, p. 137).
5 I would instance Stephen Banns learned essay in Ian Hamilton Finlay,
Inter Artes et Naturam, exh. cat., Muse dArt Moderne de la Ville de Paris
(1987). Or there is Michael Baths essay, Mobilizing the Gap: Hamilton Finlays
Inheritance, Glasgow Emblem Studies, 10 (2005), pp. 11328, which begins in the
garden of Little Sparta, that is said to reect Finlays preoccupation with
symbolic images and monumental inscriptions, but soon leaves it to pursue
those concerns outside the physical constraints of the gardens setting.
6 Rosemarie E. Pahlke in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 19631997:
Druckgrak, ed. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostldern, 1997), p. 274.
1 Words of a dead poet . . .

1 See my more extended meditation on this installation, vnda Pacica, in
special issue of the New Arcadian Journal (Autumn 2007). There are several
other instances of Finlays use of this Latin word in his landscapes.
2 See J. McInerney, Do You See What I See? Plutarch and Pausanias at
Delphi, in The Statesmen in Plutarchs Work, ed. L De Zlais et al. (London,
2004), pp. 4355. On Finlays exhibit of 1977 on the Battle of Midway, see Wood
Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Alex Finlay
(Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 9096, and Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual
Primer [1985], 2nd edn (London, 1992), p. 110.
3 From page to garden
154 The wooded fringes

of the Front Garden,
Little Sparta.
1 A selection of these neon poems were displayed at, and reproduced in, the
catalogue of the Victoria Miro Gallery exhibition, Remembrance: Ian Hamilton
Finlay, 19252006 (Dunsyre,2007).
2 Other versions of this may be found in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963
1997: Druckgrak, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostldern, 1997),
4.87.7,4.92.2 and 3,4.92.4.
3 This remark occurs in Finlays proposal of 1979 for the Lothian Estates,
Monteviot, reprinted by the New Arcadians in Mr Aislabies Gardens (May
183
1981), n. p., discussed in the next paragraph.

4 Stephen Bann makes the point that this was the rst Finlay project to
involve a cultural dimension of landscape: A Description of Stonypath, Journal of Garden History, i (1981), p. 114. The project is illustrated in Yves Abrioux,
Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer [1985],2nd edn (London, 1992), pp. 2489.
5 Patrick Eyres discusses this in his essay, Naturalizing Neoclassicism: Little
Sparta and the Public Gardens of Ian Hamilton Finlay, in Sculpture and the
Garden, ed. Patrick Eyres and Fiona Russell (Aldershot, Hants, 2006),
specically pp. 1715.
6 Let it be clear that I use this term in its original Renaissance sense of a
perceptive, witty formulation of an idea or experience.
7 See Giloniss note on plates 28 and 29 in Fleur de lAir: A Garden in
Provence by Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Pia Maria Simig (Dunsyre, 2004) [with
photographs by Volkmar Herre, introduction by John Dixon Hunt and
commentaries by Harry Gilonis].
8 See commentary on plates 35 and 43 in ibid.
9 See From Book to Garden and Back: Ian Hamilton Finlay. Four Essays
and an Exhibition Catalogue, special issue of Word & Image: A Journal of
Verbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), catalogue ix.2. The temple was erected
and subsequently removed, since Finlay found its scale too obtrusive on the
banks of the Lochan: it has been re-erected in the woodland of a private estate
near Edinburgh (see illus. III.83).
10 Ibid., ix.3; and for the two following Portland proposals, ix.4 and ix.5.
A further proposal for The Leasowes is discussed below in the paragraph on
Neo-classical landscapes.
11 Ibid., ix.7.
12 A good example would be the explanation by Laurie Olin of his designs
for the forecourt of the Wexner Arts Center on the Ohio State University
campus in Columbus, Ohio: see Memory not Nostalgia, in Memory, Expression, Representation, ed. W. Gary Smith (Austin, tx, 2002), pp. 817.
13 Recent introductions to emblems are: John Manning, The Emblem
(London,2002), and Michael Leslie, The Dialogue between Bodies and Souls:
Pictures and Poesy in the English Renaissance, Word & Image, i (1985),
pp. 1630. The latter includes a discussion of the crucial difference between
emblem and impresa that is more relevant to Finlay than is usually allowed.
Finlay apparently relied on Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century
Imagery, 2nd edn (Rome, 1964).
14 Michael Bath, Mobilizing the Gap: Hamilton Finlays Inheritance,
Glasgow Emblem Studies, 10 (2005), p. 118, citing Daniel Russell, Emblematic
Structures in Renaissance French Culture (Toronto, 1995).
15 In an interview with Alan Woods, transcript, ii/1 (1997), p. 17.
16 At the time of my exhibition in Philadelphia, when this proposal was
exhibited, I wrote to the persons named by Finlay on this garden commission
at the admittedly vague address of West Pound Ridge; the envelope came back
as Undelivered. It would be good to know whether the installation was ever
accomplished. See From Book to Garden and Back, ix.1.
4 Detached sentences
1 A useful and accessible selection of these is now available in Ian Hamilton
Finlay, Sentences (Edinburgh, 2005); see also illus. 19 and 28.
2 Harry Gilonis has selected some of these and set them in comparison with
Shenstones as an appendix to an essay in the New Arcadian Journal, 534
(2002), pp. 1078.
184
references
3 There are two possible explanations for this change of title. Harry Gilonis
has suggested to me that Finlay derived it from Charles Lambs Detached
Thoughts on Books and Reading (1833). An alternative account comes to me
from Stephen Bann, who lent Finlay a Cooke edition of Shenstone (c. 1830),
where the garden sentences were in fact printed as an Essay on landscape and
ornamental gardening, while the rest of the volume was devoted to Shenstones
Detached Thoughts on dress and other matters. It should also be noted,
however, that fragments, detached thoughts and other such isolated dicta
became a characteristic genre by the end of the eighteenth century: see section
Sixteen, note 32.
4 On concrete poetry, see Concrete Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Stephen Bann
(London, 1967), and Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View
(Bloomington, in, 1968).
5 See Rosemarie E. Pahlke in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 19631997:
Druckgrak, ed. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostldern, 1997), p. 252.
6 See Five Words, 1986, in From Book to Garden and Back: Ian Hamilton
Finlay. Four Essays and an Exhibition Catalogue, special issue of Word &
Image: A Journal of Verbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), i.9.
5 Fragments, excerpts & incompletions

1 The fragment enjoyed a huge vogue in post-Enlightenment culture, both
visual and verbal, which I take up very briey in the nal section (see p. 170).
2 Writing of the early seventeenth-century Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg,
Morgan says there was no requirement that the disparate elements of such a
garden resolve into a unied or cohesive whole, or that together the various
elements or topoi should combine to produce a meaning greater than the sum
of its parts; Nature as Model: Salomon de Caus and Early Seventeenth-Century
Landscape Design (Philadelphia, pa, 2007), p. 30. That is surely true of most
gardens. But see also the end of this paragraph and my article cited in note 7
below.
3 See Giloniss commentary in Works in Europe, 19721995, ed. Zdenek Felix
and Pia Simig (Ostldern, 1995), where they are all illustrated.
4 Description of Stonypath, Journal of Garden History, i (1981), p. 114. What
he may well have had in mind is Finlays booklet of Antoine Watteaus painting,
Embarquement pour Cythre, which would have translated the pages into a
sequence of slabs when constructed as a three-dimensional landscape: see
section Three, note 4, above.
5 I am thinking of a book such as Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton,
Landscape Narratives: Design Practices for Telling Stories (New York, 1998).
6 There are perhaps exceptions that prove this rule: the itineraries of the
Sacre Monte in northern Italy recreate the biblical narrative of Christs
crucixion and so necessarily have a predetermined and necessary sequence
of events.
7 I have examined the gardens inability to function like a literary narrative
in two related essays: Stourhead Revisited and the Pursuit of Meaning in
Gardens, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 26 (2006),
pp. 32841, and Meaning, in The Cultural History of Gardens, ed. Michael
Leslie and John Dixon Hunt, vol. vi: The Modern Period (forthcoming).
8 Ian Hamilton Finlay: gnomique et gnomonique (Lige, 1977), p. 7, my italics
(son jardin, un livre que lon ne peut feuilleter mais ou il fait bon sarreter pour
mediter).
9 References by volume and chapter, here i.1. I am aware that this analogy
will call in question my scepticism with Stephen Banns suggestion that we
185
explore Little Sparta as a sequence of pages in a book. To which it may be

answered that Sternes novel pushes sequence and discursive coherence to the
limits (of itself and in the minds of its characters) and is restrained only by its
very need to be printed in numbered books, chapters and pages.
10 Eighteenth-century gardenists, like Shenstone and Girardin, also knew
and exploited the literature on associationism: why Sterne is so useful is that he
makes one aware of its workings and how they may be manipulated. It is a
continuous concern of Sternes, but see in particular i.21, viii.32 and ix.20, and
my commentary thereon in my inaugural lecture at the University of Leiden, A
Handle on Tristram Shandy; or, Uncle Tobys Wound and Other Words and
Images (Leiden, 1984).
11 Letters of Laurence Sterne, ed. L. P. Curtis (Oxford, 1935), p. 411.
12 For which connection I am indebted to Susan Stewart, Garden Agon,
Representations, 62 (Spring 1998), p. 118. This essay has also appeared in her
collection, The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics (Chicago, 2005),
pp. 11134, and in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika
Suderberg (Minneapolis, mn, 2000), pp. 10029.
13 This perception from Rudolf Borchardt, The Passionate Gardener
(Kingston, ny, 2006), p. 9.
14 See Roland Barthes discussion of silhouettes in The Responsibility of
Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation (Berkeley, ca, 1985),
pp. 1067.
15 John Constables Correspondence, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich, 1968), pp. 778.
16 I rst encountered Finlays stiles at the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988
and foolishly thought I might persuade an American institution to buy and
instal them. Their subsequent realization at Little Sparta and in the different
terrain of Provenal terraces has considerably augmented their signicance.
17 See the wonderful anthology of photographs of these paths by Andrew
Lawson in Jessie Sheeler, Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay
(London, 2003), pp. 4041.
18 David Leatherbarrow, The Roots of Architectural Invention (Cambridge,
1993), p. 3.
6 Inscriptions
1 In Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sentences (Edinburgh, 2005).
2 From Book to Garden and Back: Ian Hamilton Finlay. Four Essays and an
Exhibition Catalogue, special issue of Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal /
Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), vi.5. Finlay puts restore into inverted commas.
3 And see the discussion above (pp. 434) of hic jacet.
4 On the interpretation of the Poussin imagery upon which Finlay relied,
see Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition, in
Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, ny, 1955), pp. 295320, which is the
version (there are two) that Finlay used. See also the discussion below, pp.
948. Poussin painted two versions of this scene circa 1630 and the early 1640s.
5 See Valentina Follo, The world has been empty since the Romans, Word
& Image, xxi/4 (2005), pp. 27487. See Poursuites rvolutionnaires / Revolutionary Poursuits (Jouy-en-Josas, 1987), p. 25, also the essay there by Yves Abrioux.
6 See Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer [1985], 2nd edn
(London, 1992), p. 269.
7 See Harry Gilonis, Ian Hamilton Finlays Inscription and the Shipwreck
of the Singular, in Where is Abel Thy Brother?, exh. cat., Zacheta Gallery of
Contemporary Art, Warsaw (1995), p. 15; also Susan Stewarts remark that
Finlays Little Sparta is within the edge of Roman dominion, between the walls
186 references
of Hadrian and Antonius, in Garden Agon, Representations, 62 (1998), p. 116.

8 Jessie Sheeler, Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay (London,
2003), p. 78.
9 See my Pegaso in villa: variazioni sul tema, in Villa Lante a Bagnaia, ed.
Sabine Frommel (Milan, 2005), pp. 13243.
10 See commentary on the photographs in Fleur de lAir: A Garden in
Provence by Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Pia Maria Simig (Dunsyre, 2004) [with
photographs by Volkmar Herre, introduction by John Dixon Hunt and
commentaries by Harry Gilonis], n. p.
11 This is illustrated in the catalogue of the Louvre exhibition of 19945,
Nicolas Poussin, 15941665, p. 409.
12 For a recent analysis of Petrarchs gardens, see Raffaella Fabiano
Giannetto, Medici Gardens: From Making to Design, Penn Studies in Landscape
Architecture (Philadelphia, pa, 2008), pp. 99115.
13 Fleur de lAir, notes to plates 60 and 61. It may also be true that via his
abstractions Finlay gives us a better grasp of Petrarch at Vaucluse than a visit
nowadays to the actual site permits!
14 See section Five, note 8.
15 Finlay has proposed an enlarged bronze version of one of the Provence
Muses, installed now on an oak plinth, for the woodlands of a private estate
near Edinburgh: it will be marked simply with an x, the Roman ten, being
a reference to Platos idea of Sappho as the tenth muse. (Personal communication from Pia Maria Simig.)
7 Spaces full of doubt

1 Quoted in Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton
Finlay, ed. Alex Finlay (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 1878, from Mary Ellen Solts
anthology, Concrete Poetry: A World View (Bloomington, in, 1968), p. 84.
2 This would involve a wide detour, but the reader is directed towards the
collection of modern poems on gardens in my edition of the Oxford Book of
Garden Verse (1993), where the incidence of sentimentality or condence is
strikingly small.
3 See these and other Unconnected Sentences in Ian Hamilton Finlay,
Sentences (Edinburgh, 2005).
4 From Unconnected sentences on gardening (see illus. 28).
5 See Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer [1985], 2nd edn
(London, 1992), p. 17. The pergola is discussed below in section Fifteen.

1 I have tried to understand the folly in its landscape architectural role in
my essay, Folly in the Garden, forthcoming in the revived publication of The
Hopkins Review, 2 (Spring 2008), pp. 22762.
2 Published by Jonathan Cape, p. 492; the text goes on to complain that
these are not macho. For some of Finlays ripostes, see Ian Hamilton Finlay:
Prints, 19631997: Druckgrak, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig
(Ostldern, 1997), and From Book to Garden and Back: Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Four Essays and an Exhibition Catalogue, special issue of Word & Image: A
Journal of Verbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), viii.68. See also Blast Folly
Bless Arcadia, New Arcadian Journal, 24 (Winter 1986). A second edition of the
offending book, now retitled Follies, Grottoes and Garden Buildings, was issued
by the Aurum Press in 1999, and all mention of Little Sparta was excised.
3 Personal communication of 23 April 1996, at which time he also copied for
me the letter to the other correspondent.
187
4 A useful interview with Finlay on this topic was conducted by Paul

Crowther, Ian Hamilton Finlay: Classicism, Piety and Nature, Art and Design
(May 1994), pp. 8593.
5 Augustin Berque et al., Mouvance: cinquante mots pour le paysage (Paris,
1999), p. 67.
6 Barthes, Oeuvres compltes, 3 vols (Paris, 1993), vol. i, 1552.
9 Mare nostrum
1 Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia . . . (London, 1732), no. 701.
2 See Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay,
ed. Alex Finlay (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 198200.
3 James Turner, The Structure of Henry Hoares Stourhead, Art Bulletin,
lxi (1979), p. 75. Turners article (pp. 6874) makes much of the oceanic
signicance of the lake at Stourhead, and I have drawn upon his ideas in what
follows. The Switzer quotation that follows, also used by Turner, is from
Ichnographia Rustica (1718), i, 313.
4 See the remarks by Miles Hadeld quoted by Stephen Bann in Nature
Over Again After Poussin, the catalogue for the Finlay exhibition at the
University of Strathclyde (1980), p. 9, and the nal sentence of illus. 28:
Hadeld and Hyams are the Ice Age of the English landscape garden.
10 Et in Arcadia Ego
1 I.H.F., quoted Stephen Bann, Scottish International (1967), p. 47.
2 Erwin Panofsky, Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition, in
Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, ny, 1955), pp.295320; the Footnotes
are reproduced in Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer [1985],
2nd edn (London, 1992), pp. 2457, having rst appeared in the 1977 Serpentine
Gallery catalogue (Ian Hamilton Finlay).
3 For the tempietto proposal, see From Book to Garden and Back: Ian
Hamilton Finlay. Four Essays and an Exhibition Catalogue, special issue of
Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), ix.2, and that
for the sheepfold, pp. 2930 above.
4 Pahlkes commentary in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 19631997: Druckgrak, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostldern, 1997), p. 272.
5 The General History of Polybius, trans. Mr Hampton, 2 vols (Oxford, 1823),
i, 344 ff.
6 See the chapter Arcadia in Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet:
Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London,
1969), where the various attributes of the goat-god are discussed including
the fact that Pans crook is an offensive weapon (p. 241).
7 Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 19631997: Druckgrak, 4.87.11 (p. 124). And
see Wolfgang Ollrich, Shooting Practice in Arcadia: Hiertenlied (Shepherds
Song) by Ian Hamilton Finlay, in Flora and the Fine Arts (Magdeburg, 1999).
8 See Claude Glintz, Neoclassical Rearmament, Art in America, lxxv/2
(1987), pp. 11017. The phrase may be taken as a Finlayian erratum for the
Moral Rearmament movement. For A New Arcadian Dictionary, for which we
have only certain entries, see Christopher McIntosh, Coincidence in the Work of
Ian Hamilton Finlay, exh. cat., Graeme Murray Gallery, Edinburgh (1980).
Further, see Stephen Bann, A Luton Arcadia: Ian Hamilton Finlays Contribution to the English Neo-Classical Tradition, Studies in the History of Gardens
and Designed Landscapes, 13 (1993), pp. 10424; Patrick Eyres, Ian Hamilton
Finlay and the Cultural Politics of Neo-Classical Gardening, Journal of Garden
History, xxviii/1 (2000), pp. 15266.
188
references
11 [Neo-]classical landscapes
1 See Kenneth Woodbridge, Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of English
Culture at Stourhead, 17181838 (Oxford, 1970), gures 4a and 5.
2 This is the important lesson taught by Robert Rosenblums pioneering
study, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, nj, 1967). It is
irrelevant whether Finlay ever read it or had somebody tell him about it, since
his own inventive imagination grasped the same essential point about the
Neoclassical aesthetic.
3 This is not the place for any detailed account of these two gardens, for
which see Denis Lambin, Ermenonville Today, Journal of Garden History, viii
(1988), pp. 4259. See also Promenade; ou, Itinraire des Jardins dErmononville
(Paris, 1788; reprinted2006). For The Leasowes, the best account is still the
contemporary one (see following note). Finlays bench for The Leasowes is
illustrated in Works in Europe, 19721995, ed. Zdenek Felix and Pia Simig
(Ostldern, 1995) [with notes in English and German by Harry Gilonis and
introduction by John Dixon Hunt].
4 Quoted here from Dodsleys Description of the Leasowes, in Shenstones
The Works in Verse and Prose, 3 vols, 5th edn (London, 1777), vol. ii, p. 291. Shenstones Unconnected Sentences, quoted later, are from this same volume, p. 126.
It is incidentally interesting in connection with Finlay that this second volume
published by Dodsley has an engraved frontispiece of Apollo with the caption
reading this rst of Swains, The soothest Shepherd that eer pipd on Plains.
Verbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), vi.6.
6 Spoken in an interview with Nagy Rashwan, Jacket, 15 (December 2001):
see http://jacketmagazine.com/15/rash-iv-nlay.html.
7 Dodsley cites the inscriptions in his Description of the Leasowes, p. 314.
8 Nature and the Politics of Hope: Ermenonville and Little Sparta, Word &
Image, xxi (2005), pp. 28893.
9 For the design, see From Book to Garden and Back, vii.1, in the format of
a Christmas card (2002).
10 For the rst of these, see Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 19631997:
Druckgrak, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostldern, 1997), 4.87.24,
and the second in The Poor Fisherman Catalogue, Talbot Rice Gallery,
Edinburgh (1991). Both are also illustrated in Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton
Finlay: A Visual Primer [1985], 2nd edn (London, 1992), pp. 32 and 119.
12 Revolutions
1 In this section I am particularly indebted to what Jessie Sheeler (Little
Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay, London, 2003, pp. 97104) and Yves
Abrioux, in both his Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer [1985], 2nd edn
(London, 1992), and his essay in Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry and Art
of Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Alex Finlay (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 15675, have
written on Finlays Revolutionary interests, which certainly greatly exceed the
scope of his garden art, even while being essential to it.
2 On the signicance more generally of the tree for Finlay, see Francis
Edeline, LAbre qui cache la fret, Art & Fact, 17 (1998), pp. 8691.
3 Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed.
Alex Finlay (Edinburgh, 1995), p. 265. Claude Gintz (Neoclassical Rearmament,
Art in America, lxxv/2, 1987, pp. 11017) writes of a Finlay work, a sickle lettered
Revolution, a continuation of pastoral by other means.
189
and an Exhibition Catalogue, special issue of Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal
/ Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), pp. 34951 and 3545, for more details of Finlays
publications that invoke Rousseaus life. On the cancelled Versailles project, see
Gavin Keeney, A Revolutionary Arcadia: Reading Ian Hamilton Finlays Un
Jardin Rvolutionnaire, Word & Image, xi (1995), pp. 23755.
5 Finlay wrote of true art [as] (the actualizing, materializing) of an idea in
a letter to the author (5 June 1996). On the publication of 1986, see From Book
to Garden and Back, vii.5.
6 I owe this detail to John B. Ravenal and Andrea Miller-Keller, the authors
of a catalogue brochure on Finlay, MATRIX 116, published by the Wadsworth
Atheneum, Hartford, ct (1991).
7 Saint-Just is admittedly a difcult and ambiguous gure: I have found
much to guide me in the biography of him by Norman Hampson (Oxford,
1991), especially his fourth chapter, On Nature. A more sympathetic treatment
may be found in Eugene N. Curtis, Saint-Just: Colleague of Robespierre (New
York, 1973). For Finlays claim about audacity, see Wood Notes Wild: Essays on
the Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed. Alex Finlay (Edinburgh, 1995),
p. 148, citing Poursuites Revolutionnaires, where were also printed the Selected
Dispatches of Louis Antoine Saint-Just, in their turn reprinted in Edinburgh
Review, 89 (Spring 1993). Finlay also consulted R. R. Palmers collective
biography of the Committee of Public Safety, The Twelve who Ruled (1941;
reprinted 1971 and 1989).
8 The print of this denition is in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 19631997:
Druckgrak, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostldern, 1997), 4.86.5
(p. 104).
9 I realize that Abrioux also asks that question (Wood Notes Wild, p. 168),
but unlike his learned analysis that constantly leaves the garden for wider
territories, I want to conne myself to what helps us respond within the
gardens themselves. He does note that the denition was completed with
seed packets that each bore the name of members of the Committee of Public
Safety (ibid., note 5).
10 Sheeler, Little Sparta, p. 101.
11 Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 19631997: Druckgrak, 4.87.11.
12 Reprinted in Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sentences (Edinburgh, 2005), where
can be seen its illustration by the progression (or descent) from calligraphic
double ss as 00 to the ss.
13 Crowther, Ian Hamilton Finlay: Classicism, Piety and Nature. An
Interview, Art and Design (May 1994), pp. 8593. Crowther does not note that
the ethical issue was also tangled in the contorted bureaucratic process for
re-classifying the building by applying for discretionary or mandatory relief,
although it had perhaps small relevance to Finlays immediate point. For an
account of the Little Sparta War and its tactics, see the supplement to the
Poetry Nation Review, x/1 (February 1983), A Bridge Too Far and Dispatches
from the Little Sparta War, New Arcadian Journal, 23 (Autumn 1986).
14 Saint-Lambert, who is quoted by Michel Baridon, From Book to Garden
and Back, p. 290.
13 Errata, or recovered in translation

1 In one stele, marked stiles, are the names of Fuller, Lamb, Coleridge and
Taylor; on the other marked gates, Johnson, Pope, Hazlitt and Swift.
Through their imaginations, it is implied, may we enter into a fuller perception
of the world.
2 See my Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English
190 references
Imagination, 16001750 (Philadelphia, pa, 1996), chapter 3: Ovid in the Garden.

3 In the original 1983 cards have further lower-case letters for fountain and
nightingale, but these were dropped in the 1986 Proposal.
Verbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), pp. 2968 and 35962; and Ian Hamilton
Finlay: Prints, 19631997: Druckgrak, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig
(Ostldern, 1997), 5.864 (pp. 1089). See also A Peoples Arcadia, New Arcadian
Journal, 334 (1992), pp. 62106, which reproduces the proposal and supplies
commentary on the park itself.
5 A further twist is that we can read on the inscribed block that ancient
Pythagoreans thought humans were but the ock of the gods!
6 Engraved versions of these urns were published by J. Vardy in Some
Designs of My Inigo Jones and Mr William Kent (1744) and illustrated in my
William Kent: Landscape Garden Designer (London, 1987), p. 71.
7 For this, see my Garden and Grove, chapter 5: Garden and Theatre.
8 Cited in the notes to the texts in New Arcadian Journal (see note 4 above).
9 Finlays proposal of 1979 for the Lothian Estates, Monteviot, reprinted by
the New Arcadians in Mr Aislabies Gardens (May 1981), folio 5.
10 The text of Finlays proposal is reprinted in Renato Barilli et al., Art in
Arcadia: The Gori Collection, Celle. A Tuscan Patron of Contemporary Art at His
Country House (Turin, 1994), pp. 14851. Not all of the design was installed a
small circular temple is missing and, as usual with Finlay, by no means all of
the proposal text is inscribed on the site itself.
11 I am responding to what was in fact realized: further items a tempietto
and a rill were not created and would undoubtedly have been somewhat
more conspicuous. Frankly, I prefer it as it is now.
12 See Francis Edeline, Rexions sur le camouage, Art & Fact, 7 (1988),
pp. 12933.
13 These are reprinted in Barilli et al., Art in Arcadia. The whole set of
Denitions, with their precedents and eventual materializations, provides
another example of the moves between page and garden that Finlay explores.
14 See Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 19631997: Druckgrak, 4.89.6 (pp. 1569);
and for the following example, 4.87.26 (p. 137).
15 Ibid., 4.83.2 (p. 86).
16 See his Unnatural Pebbles: With Detached Sentences on the Pebble, Graeme
Murray Gallery, Edinburgh (1981), one of the latter reading that A pebble is a
crumb of the Ancient Geology.
14 Mower is Less
1 Among the aphorisms printed in Little Sparta: A Portrait of a Garden, at
the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Verbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), iv.3.
3 This site is illustrated in Works in Europe, 19721995, ed. Zdenek Felix and
Pia Simig Hunt (Ostldern, 1995) [with notes in English and German by Harry
Gilonis and introduction by John Dixon Hunt].
15 A solid place
1 Quoted in Alec Finlay, Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry and Art of Ian
Hamilton Finlay, ed. Alex Finlay (Edinburgh, 1995), p. xv.
191
erbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), viii.6.
3 An example might be the American landscape architect and planner John
Nolan, who insisted that one possesses civic spirit only when one is nding an
outlet for it; civic virtue only when ones will is expressing itself in productive
action: City planning and civic consciousness, New Boston, ii/1 (1911),
pp. 78.
16 Gardens matter
1 I.H.F. in an interview with Francis Edeline, in his Ian Hamilton Finlay:
gnomique et gnomonique (Lige, 1977), p. 53 (je me demande si les potes
eux-mmes se sont rendus compte de ce qui se passait . . .).
2 Wood Notes Wild: Essays on the Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay, ed.
Alex Finlay (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 367.
3 Finlay to Paul Crowther (Ian Hamilton Finlay: Classicism, Piety and
Nature, Art and Design, May 1994, p. 92). Cf. both Michel Baridons You feel
that inscriptions are an organic part of nature (From Book to Garden and
Back: Ian Hamilton Finlay. Four Essays and an Exhibition Catalogue, special
issue of Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4, 2005, p. 293),
and the remark by Ravenal and Miller-Keller, in the pamphlet MATRIX 116 (by
John B. Ravenal and Andrea Miller-Keller, published by the Wadsworth
Atheneum, Hartford, ct, 1991), that each spadeful of earth [which] brings the
gardener closer to imposing a specic order upon unruly nature made the
garden a paradigm for action based on ideas and ideals.
4 It is perhaps ironic and sad that his non-garden work will survive much
more easily than his gardens, which, however carefully and thoughtfully
tended, have necessarily and by their very nature a much more difcult existence ahead of them. Et in Arcadia Ego.
5 Aphorisms on the Garden of an Aphorist, Art and Design, 2 (March 1986),
p. 22.
6 He went on to say it was therefore a proper work for an exile: Detached
Sentences on Exile, New Arcadian Journal, 10 (Summer 1985), n. p.
7 Nagy Rashwan, in interview with Finlay, The Death of Piety, published in
the magazine Jacket, 15 (December 2001), quoting Bob Perelman on the fallacy
of the poetic.
8 The piece has been subsequently realized in Carrara marble in a Carrara
park. See Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 19631997: Druckgrak, ed. Rosemarie E.
Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostldern, 1997), p. 114, for an illustration of the before
and after images, only one of which is reproduced here.
9 See Ian Hamilton Finlay, Inter Artes et Naturam, exh. cat., Muse dArt
Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1987), bilingual essay therein by Stephen Bann.
10 For a fuller presentation of this sixteenth-century idea and its continuing
role in landscape design, see my Greater Perfections: The Practice of Garden
Theory (London, 2000), chapter 3.
11 Susan Stewart reads the exaggerations of scale in Finlay as a mode of
transformation or metamorphosis (see section Five, note 12, p. 27).
12 The original proposal, with a computer-generated image of the temple, is
in From Book to Garden and Back, ix.2.
13 The Fearful Sphere of Pascal, Labyrinths (New York, 1962), p. 188.
14 In an unpublished essay by Harry Gilonis on Finlay and Rousseau, kindly
communicated, he cites these lines by Ezra Pound to exemplify an aesthetic
poetry that World War i was busy making obsolete; in garden terms we might
192
references
see Finlay as registering the obsolescence of Edwardian gardening in

contemporary society.
15 I.H.F. to Nagy Rashwan (The Death of Piety).
16 Finlay in response to Edeline (Ian Hamilton Finlay: gnomique et
gnomonique), p. 53.
17 From selected pages in Little Sparta: A Portrait of a Garden, Scottish
National Portrait Gallery. The following quotation of Finlays is to be found in
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Sentences (Edinburgh, 2005).
18 Yves Abrioux in Wood Notes Wild, p. 167.
19 In interview with Paul Crowther (Classicism, Piety and Nature),
pp. 912. Another piece of self-effacement is I am only a wee Scottish poet
on the outside of everything (interview with Nagy Rashwan, The Death of
Piety).
20 Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley, ca,
1996), p. 105.
21 An American contemporary of Finlay, a great landscaper in his own way,
Dan Kiley, said of one of his works (Fountain Place, Dallas, tx) that it was Not
a replication of nature, but a compacted experience of nature so intense that it
would be almost super-natural. Quoted in Dan Kiley and Jane Amidon, Dan
Kiley: The Complete Works of Americas Master Landscape Architect (Boston, ma,
1999), p. 98.
22 Tom Lubbock in the Independent obituary for Finlay.
23 Finlay quoted by Sue Innes in Wood Notes Wild, p. 12.
24 Detached Sentences on Exile, New Arcadian Journal, 10 (1985), n. p.
25 Wood Notes Wild, p. 215.
26 See, for instance, Robert E. Harrist, Jr, The Landscape of Words: Stone
Inscriptions from Early and Mediaeval China (Seattle, wa, 2008).
27 Some of these have been discussed. But for a full sampling, see Works
in Europe, 19721995, ed. Zdenek Felix and Pia Simig (Ostldern, 1995) [with
notes in English and German by Harry Gilonis and introduction by John
Dixon Hunt].
28 Interview with Nagy Rashwan (The Death of Piety); I am assuming,
from the context, that he meant the neo-classical, hence my proposed erratum.
29 Stephen Bann in booklet produced for an exhibition at the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, the MacRobert Centre at the
University of Stirling and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, and issued by Wild
Hawthorn Press and the Ceolfrith Press (1972), p. 11 (distinguishing between
Classicism and the Classical).
30 One example of the many current devaluations of classical: at the
Chelsea Flower Show of 2005, the leading property consultants, Savills,
presented a garden designed by Clare Agnew in the form of a classical portico
(suggestive of Roman architecture), cypress trees, a water channel, classical
busts and some truncated pyramids, all a reection of a tranquil Italian
courtyard garden with an interpretation of classical hard landscaping, that
bets the Grand Tour theme (quoting from Press Release of 15 February 2005).
31 The letter is reprinted at the end of the museums publication, Ian
Hamilton Finlay, Inter Artes et Naturam.
32 This is too huge a topic to take up here: but see a recent collection of
essays that suggests the scope of this particular theme: Fragments: Architecture
and the Unnished. Essays Presented to Robin Middleton, ed. Barry Bergdoll and
Werner Oechslin (London, 2006). For some literary perspective, Mark Scroggins
in Jacket (jacketmagazine.com/15/nlay-by-scroggins.html).
33 I have discussed this crucial dmarche in garden theory and practice in
my Emblem and Expression in the 18th-Century Landscape Garden in Gardens
193
and the Picturesque (Cambridge, ma, 1992), pp. 75104.

34 Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), p. 109.
35 Patrick Eyres, Variations on Several Themes: Ian Hamilton Finlay in
Barcelona, Sculpture Journal, iv (2000), p. 199.
36 Finlay in interview with Paul Crowther (Classicism, Piety and Nature),
p. 87, as for the following remark.
37 Finlay in interview with Udo Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture
and Land Art (Basel, Berlin and Boston, ma, 1999), pp. 934 and 98.
194
references
Acknowledgements
First, I must invoke the memory of Ian himself and my gratitude

for his welcome at Little Sparta and for the delights and stimulations of his correspondence. On two occasions he invited me to
write short introductions for books he was publishing about his
gardens; I hope he would have been as generous and pleased with
this longer essay as he apparently was with those. To his literary
executor, Pia Maria Simig, I am beholden for permission to reproduce materials, to her generosity in helping me with this essay,
and to her welcome at Little Sparta in the summer of 2007.
Anyone who writes about Ian Hamilton Finlay can only be
grateful to previous commentators: for their learned and authoritative commentaries on Finlays uvre I am most indebted to Yves
Abrioux, Stephen Bann and Harry Gilonis, and to the last of these
I am also grateful for extensive help during the writing of this book.
My colleague, David Leatherbarrow, took time to read a nal draft
and to his ever-scrupulous reading its revision is indebted. I am also
obliged to all the design students, too numerous to name, who were
asked to confront Finlays gardens in landscape history and theory
courses at the University of Pennsylvania, and to two doctoral students, Jody Beck and Valentina Folla, from all of whom I have learnt.
This book could not have been published without recourse to
the superb Finlay collections of Marvin and Ruth Sackner, and I
thank them for their kind agreement to let me reproduce materials in their possession. Equally, to the owner of Fleur de lAir I am
grateful for the extremely warm welcome accorded to Emily
Cooperman and myself when we visited it and for his subsequent
willingness to let me write about and illustrate it. To the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, particularly the Fisher Fine Arts
Library, and its librarian William Keller, and the Annenberg Rare
Book & Manuscript Library Room, I am indebted for permission
to reproduce items in their collections and, originally, for the huge
effort which the staff at the latter (its then director Michael Ryan,
and Andrea Gottschalk) put into the Finlay exhibition that I
mounted there in 2005.
195
Finally, I must thank Emily Cooperman, both for photographs

that she took on various Finlay sites when we visited them together
and for her skill and patience with manipulating images for publication. To her, this book is dedicated.
196 acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
The majority of the garden photographs were specially taken by

Emily T. Cooperman for this publication. They have been supplemented with others, mostly by the author; he, and the publishers,
wish to express their thanks to the below sources for illustrative
material and/or permission to reproduce it.
Photos courtesy of the Annenberg Rare Book & Manuscript
Library, University of Pennsylvania: 22, 28, 101, 111; photos by or
courtesy of the author: 6, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 30, 33, 34, 51, 59, 98, 102,
104, 124, 136, 144, 148, 151; photo Anneke Bakker: 145; courtesy of
the artist (Chris Broughton) and the New Arcadian Press: 123;
photos by Emily T. Cooperman: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20,
25, 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54,
55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76,
77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97,
99, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121,
122, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 146, 147,
149, 150, 152, 153, 154; images Gary Hincks, reprinted with permission: pp. 1789, 18081; photo John Irvine: 87; photo Monika
Nikolic: 115; photos courtesy of Marvin and Ruth Sackner: 15, 21,
23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 31, 52, 110, 127, 130; photo Tessa Traegar: 133.
197

John Dixon-Hunt-Nature Over Again - The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (2009)

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NATURE OVER AGAIN

John Dixon Hunt

nature over again

NATURE OVER AGAIN

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

First published 2008

1 Nuclear Sail seen across

2 The obelisk dedicated

3 View of the tempietto at

This small book takes up and augments some of my earlier and

But Finlay has intervened in several other places the grounds

or landscape architecture. This meant, certainly, tracking the

1 Words of a dead poet . . .

4 The Woodland Garden,

Ian Hamilton Finlays death in February 2006 at the age of eighty

5 A distant view of the Saint-Just blocks (the present

all now found in another kind of wood, another meadow than

16 words of a dead poet . . .

Yet (always a crucial conjunction in writing about Finlay) our

2 Garden matters: a tangible image . . .

So how do we confront a garden by Ian Hamilton Finlay? Imagine

7 The path with the

9 Obelisk, inscribed with

10 wave stones set on

20 garden matters: a tangible image . . .

11 Ripple steppingstones in the Middle Pool,

obvious: there will be a great amount of words to read inscribed

12 Sundial bench and

13 The Epicurus herm

it is unlikely to be an experience that is simply acceptable, routine,

garden matters: a tangible image . . .

3 From page to garden

surprising that when his interests turned towards garden-making,

24 from page to garden

14 After Bernini, 1987,

has yet to receive its exact three-dimensional version, perhaps

26 from page to garden

proposal that Finlay and Gary Hincks originally produced. Their

16 A print from Six

18 The Flock stones at

28 from page to garden

30 from page to garden

21 From A Proposal for

32 from page to garden

Interesting and relevant here, then, are those emblems that

34 from page to garden

an anteboreum, or type of sundial). Trying to hold the graphic and

25 Three plinths set in

26 an 18th century line

Thomas Grays Sweet is the breath of vernal shower . . . The still

36 from page to garden

27 A Proposal for the

On innumerable occasions Finlay has adopted the practice of the

secularism, of contemporary garden culture emerges from remarks

gardens cannot deliver an overall message or story; what they can

29 Schiff, 1973, folding

31 5 words, card, 1986.

manner of the emblem book, illus. 24) to single words or phrases.

33 vnda in the Max

5 Fragments, excerpts & incompletions

Finlays penchant for the fragment, for incompleteness, for the

34 The hic jacet . . .

fragments, excerpts & incompletions