
The late Ian Hamilton Finlay's masterpiece in the Peatland Hills south of Edinburgh - and I think my favorite garden. Incorporated in the five acres are over 275 artworks by the artist that he created in collaboration with numerous local masons and craftsmen, and includes concrete poetry in sculptural form, polemic and philosophical aphorisms, sculptures, temples, carved bridges and wonderful mixed media paths and walkways. It is a remarkable place for contemplation, intellectual complexities of meaning sentiment and wit and aesthetic enjoyment. Open only on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday afternoons, 2:30-5pm, from 1st June to 29th September, if you are visiting Scotland in the summer it really is worth the effort.
Ian Hamlton Finlay and his wife Sue Finlay started the garden in 1966, calling it Stonypath but renaming it "Little Sparta" in 1983 in response to Edinburgh's nickname the Athens of the North and playing on the ancient rivalry between the Ancient Greek cities of Athens and Sparta. When we first visited the garden in 2005 Finlay was still living there, the garden has changed little since his death, still a marvelous interplay between avant-farde experimentation, Scottish whimsy and wit and English landscape tradition.
Finlay regard this 'garden poem' as his greatest work and defined the relationship between the poem-objecs and their surroundings: “Usually each area gets a small artefact, which reigns like a small deity or spirit of place. My understanding is that the work is the whole composition - the artefact in its context. The work is not an isolated object, but an object with flowers, plants, trees, water and so on".
It was his wife who planted and cultivated the majority of the garden and she described her husband's creative process in creating the concept of the garden in her memoir 'The Planting of a Hillside Garden': “The learning process. The love involved in this process. That loving absorption - the day to day tending of the poems. Their immediate surrounding areas, whether paved, grassy or covered with plants, always needed a lot of individual attention in the summer"
Ian Hamlton Finlay and his wife Sue Finlay started the garden in 1966, calling it Stonypath but renaming it "Little Sparta" in 1983 in response to Edinburgh's nickname the Athens of the North and playing on the ancient rivalry between the Ancient Greek cities of Athens and Sparta. When we first visited the garden in 2005 Finlay was still living there, the garden has changed little since his death, still a marvelous interplay between avant-farde experimentation, Scottish whimsy and wit and English landscape tradition.
Finlay regard this 'garden poem' as his greatest work and defined the relationship between the poem-objecs and their surroundings: “Usually each area gets a small artefact, which reigns like a small deity or spirit of place. My understanding is that the work is the whole composition - the artefact in its context. The work is not an isolated object, but an object with flowers, plants, trees, water and so on".
It was his wife who planted and cultivated the majority of the garden and she described her husband's creative process in creating the concept of the garden in her memoir 'The Planting of a Hillside Garden': “The learning process. The love involved in this process. That loving absorption - the day to day tending of the poems. Their immediate surrounding areas, whether paved, grassy or covered with plants, always needed a lot of individual attention in the summer"