Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay

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 Artist’s 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 l’Air, 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. Specifically, 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that I edited on that occasion (published as a special issue of the journal, Word & Image, of 21 April 2005), and an unpublished library talk that I gave, mainly to design students, during the course of that exhibition.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 Finlay’s 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 l’Air, ‘completed’1 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 Sheeler’s 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 Finlay’s own Wild Hawthorn Press, ‘Fleur de l’Air’: 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 Finlay’s garden art.

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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 Kröller-Müller 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 Finlay’s garden art – St George’s 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 Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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 first place. The temptation to turn away from his gardens has often been sustained by the greater ease with which Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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, find their best context and articulation in it; this tradition may also accommodate Finlay’s landscapes. So what I wanted to do myself was to isolate Finlay’s garden art, in all of its different manifestations, and bring to it my own longstanding concerns with the history and theory of garden-making

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preamble

or landscape architecture. This meant, certainly, tracking the garden imagination and inventions back to some of Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s rich and prolific 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 Finlay’s commentators to tackle ‘the integrity of the entire œuvre’.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 Finlay’s garden work in accordance with his own best understanding both of its contribution and its place in his total œuvre. 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 Finlay’s 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 identified). 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 Finlay’s art of gardenmaking. I have, though, tried to alert the reader, where possible, to connections that might be drawn between my ‘paragraphs’.

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1 Words of a dead poet . . . The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living w. h. auden, ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats’

4 The Woodland Garden, Little Sparta.

Ian Hamilton Finlay’s 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, fly 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 poet’s 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 poet’s verses, his river, will flow 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 poet’s demise ‘was kept from his poems’, for notwithstanding the poet’s demise, poetry ‘survives’ now ‘in the valley of its saying’; but its verse can be ‘farmed’, or it may flow 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 Finlay’s 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 field of Finlay’s own preoccupations and motifs, I am also tempted on that bluff above the Pacific to entertain other associations that are triggered by the Latin, by the stones and their carving and by the nearby ocean,

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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 Keats’s ‘stout Cortez . . . silent on a peak in Darien’ and taken with a ‘wild surmise’ as he stared at the Pacific. 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 woman’s singing. I arbitrarily augment Finlay’s 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 Pacific unseen below the university campus. Others’ voices will begin to flow through Finlay’s 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 Pacific. Since that conflict 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 significance 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 Dante’s 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 Apollo’s 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 Plutarch’s Moralia, five characters in a dialogue each propose an interpretation.2 Their solutions are less important for our purposes than that there are, in fact, five different perspectives, each of which is plausible. This possibility of multiple interpretations is entirely typical of how Finlay’s 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 sufficient ensemble or complexity of meanings. It is their plurality, the openness to various levels of response, that matters. Furthermore, given Finlay’s 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 Apollo’s shrine.

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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 flowers, 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 efficiency 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, you’ll 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.

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8 Cornucopia baskets at Little Sparta.

9 Obelisk, inscribed with ‘il riponso di claudio’, beside the Upper Pond, Little Sparta.

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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 (confined 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 you’ve probably seen in other gardens or garden centres – urns, pots, statuary whole or in fragments, figurines 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, you’ll also find 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. 53–6). 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 figures, some of which you’ve heard of, but some of whom you are meeting here for the first 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;

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12 Sundial bench and column, front garden, Little Sparta.

13 The Epicurus herm and a model of Rousseau’s tomb inscribed ‘Of Flutes & Wild Roses’ at Little Sparta.

it is unlikely to be an experience that is simply acceptable, routine, ordinary, benign. Finlay’s gardens, you conclude, are no quotidian, run-of-the-mill places; they are even paradoxical – what you took first 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 poet’s ‘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 you’d probably term ‘significance’, ‘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, you’ll need to go back once you have discovered how the garden may better be visited.

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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, we’ve 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 œuvre 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 fishermen’s 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; Finlay’s own endeavour was towards the ‘one-word poem’. It is this verbal economy that finds 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 garden’s surroundings afforded much opportunity. His non-garden œuvre contains innumerable variations on a series of themes – it is as if Finlay were trying to find the ideal formulation for an idea, an insight or an image. It is not therefore

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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 Bernini’s famous sculpture of Apollo and Daphne (illus. 14);2 they eventually find 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 Watteau’s painting L’Embarquement pour Cythère, 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 ‘Finlay’s 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; fluted 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 (finger-holes) of the “flute”’. 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 flute, 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’ (Finlay’s 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.

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has yet to receive its exact three-dimensional version, perhaps because it was specifically conceived for a given site and cannot exactly fit 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 Provençal garden, where the mistral blows and where it is particularly apt to think of Virgil’s ‘Silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena’ (‘meditating on the woodland muse with slender oaten flute’).7 Flutes and fluted 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 flute, 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 first on paper (or nowadays via digital image) before it is accepted or revised by clients, and finally undergoes implementation on a specific site. But Finlay has made an art form of the proposal itself. Doubtless the circumstance of producing the elaborate but unfulfilled 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 1985–6 for Stockwood Park in Luton is an excellent example of the divergence of the eventual built work in substance and ‘feel’ from the

26 from page to garden

proposal that Finlay and Gary Hincks originally produced. Their six engravings do in fact contain the specific 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 Lorrain’s 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 connoisseur’s 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,

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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 Stockwood Park . . . ’.

18 The ‘Flock’ stones at Stockwood Park, Luton, are often used as impromptu seats.

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19 ‘Detached Sentences on Public Space’, from the ‘Six Proposals for the Improvement of Stockwood Park . . . ’.

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 don’t 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 Finlay’s 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 flap 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 Pater’s ‘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 perfice (‘Don’t attempt what you can’t finish’).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

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of sheepfolds and finally 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 benefit 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 float their proposals on some discursive narrative, perhaps autobiographical, perhaps imaginative, of how they arrived at the final 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 student’s 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 Finlay’s proposals was for a Doric temple on the coast, to be inscribed with a quotation from the Roman Varro’s 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

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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.

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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 first with a remark of Heidegger’s 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 Virgil’s 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 first appeared in 1531, can be our example, especially since its subject is not unrelated to Finlay’s own interests in the terrors of Arcady. Emblem books like Alciati’s 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 Finlay’s reworking of both architectural fragments and aphorisms. Emblem collections were designed for use by any artist or orator who wished to find 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 Alciati’s, 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

32 from page to garden

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, Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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 doesn’t really arise’.15

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23 ‘earth . air . fire . 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 emblem’s 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, fire 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 target’s centre (it is, in fact, a schematic rendering of

24 ‘moorland marquetry’, from 35 One-Word Poems, 1982, card, with Ian Gardner.

34 from page to garden

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 reflections or meditations – the verbal puns are amplified and justified 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 final example of his exploration of the emblem, more relevant now to Finlay’s 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 flowing through the English Parkland at Little Sparta (leaf + boat / boat + bark / bark + leaf).

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26 an 18th century line on a watering-can, with Michael Harvey, 1992, folded card.

Thomas Gray’s ‘Sweet is the breath of vernal shower . . . The still small voice of gratitude’ (in the poet’s ‘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 emblem’s 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 amplified 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 significance and even extend their gnomic quality.

36 from page to garden

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 flaps and read what is underneath (had Finlay been thinking of Humphry Repton’s 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 Finlay’s about the sounds of a garden on the one and with a quotation on solitude from the French revolutionary Hérault de Séchelles on the other. A note on a right-hand flap reads: ‘Whereas a conventional artwork exists as an independent object, the environmental or garden artwork is incomplete, perhaps even incomprehensible, apart from its surroundings.’

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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 Shenstone’s 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 (it’s 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 I’ll return), makes his ‘sentences’ shorter, sharper, more gnomic. Sometimes he takes one of Shenstone’s 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 Finlay’s remarks are now, also, referred to as ‘Detached’, not just ‘Unconnected’.3 Finlay’s 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 flowers, 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 Finlay’s own garden work. His contempt for the mere banality, the

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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 financial 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 find 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 I’ll return. This detachment or lack of logical or narratival connection also alerts one to an essential element of garden art in general that Finlay’s particular perspective further endorses:

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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 Finlay’s published sequences are gathered together on one page, whereas the inscriptions tend to be scattered throughout a garden or landscape where their significance can be exponentially enlarged. The unconnected sentence and the detachment of the self from its utterance derive from Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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 definitions – a cross-breed, I’d 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 wouldn’t really work (see the motto to the third paragraph above); so he would devise other means of presenting the singular word. Maybe he’d

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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 we’d see it as reflected in water (illus. 29; cf. illus. 30); or he’d arrange words in a sequence that alerts us to the trans-linguistic identity of the thing called ‘wave’ (illus. 31); or he’d pull the same word apart, detach its first letter and release the ‘Ave’ from it, the Latin greeting of ‘hail’ (illus. 32); or he added titles or images (in the

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31 5 words, card, 1986. These words for wave in five 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 l’Air.

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 find ‘wave’ and its equivalents in other languages seeking and achieving new relationships, even new completions, in Finlay’s various landscapes: the Latin ‘vnda’ at Little Sparta, in Stuttgart and in San Diego; the five blocks engraved with the word wave in different languages, first 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 Finlay’s verbal insertions.

33 ‘vnda’ in the Max Planck Institut grounds, Stuttgart.

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5 Fragments, excerpts & incompletions Consecutive sentences are the beginning of the secular

Finlay’s 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. Finlay’s 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 first items to strike visitors as they enter. It is now inscribed on an upright stone of the sort you’d find 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

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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 gardener’s design and planting, a grove’s 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

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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.

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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 Finlay’s 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 first 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 figures encountered elsewhere – Rousseau, Caspar David Friedrich, Puvis de Chavannes or Hölderlin – 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 fleeting memories, depending on the visitor’s resources. The pyramid at Grevenbroich is presumably a tomb, but the dates 1774–1840 carved on it without further explanation do not take us much further. Maybe an educated German visitor would register the dates of the painter Friedrich’s lifespan, or recognize that they define an era of great German Romantic poets, painters and philosophers. But still we have just fragments of an undisclosed history.3 One of Finlay’s 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 key’s 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 l’Air; the latter’s 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 Finlay’s fascination with fragment and incompletion. So I find myself (unusually) in disagreement with Stephen Bann – one of Finlay’s 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 find 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 confidence 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 Finlay’s 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 it’s good to stop and think’.8

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39 Little Sparta – the small stele to the left references fishing-boat names, the obelisk is dedicated to the painter Claude Lorrain.

And this is Finlay’s 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, inflect their original meanings. This is not to say that his critics cannot provide sustained narratives or conceptual accounts of Finlay’s work by tracking his garden quotations and references back to his sources; but that resource is available to the garden’s visitors only in piecemeal, partial ways, and sometimes not at all; if we’ve done some reading, or even can draw upon an extensive general knowledge, we’ll 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 Sterne’s 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] find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last . . .’ (i.4). It plays lovingly, continuously and seriously with contemporary psychological explanations of the mind’s 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 Sterne’s novel also enacts the simultaneity of observation and reflection 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

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fragments, excerpts & incompletions

seeks from an accomplished and attentive reader a major role in putting together the story of Tristram’s 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 reader’s understanding, is to . . . leave him something to imagine . . . ’ (ii.11). That Tristram Shandy is ‘unfinished’ (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 specific 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 difficult 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 fly’ (i.14). And this ‘strange combination of ideas, the sagacious [John] Locke, who certainly understood the nature of these things better than most men, affirms 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 Finlay’s gardens, have some place, some validity in the garden’s profuse and intricate whole. Indeed, ‘nothing that has touched me’, writes Tristram, ‘will be thought trifling in its nature, or tedious in its telling’ (i.6). Everywhere in Little Sparta, Stockwood Park and Fleur de l’Air are incidents that function to trigger associations, some of which will draw upon experience and knowledge acquired outside the

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40 Apollo and Daphne (after Bernini) in the Wild Garden at Little Sparta.

garden, while others will baffle 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 figures in cut-out steel, one (in red) apparently in pursuit of the other (painted green) fleeing 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 figures as a twodimensional rendition of Bernini’s 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 Ovid’s 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 Marvell’s 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

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stimulus, the fragment of all that possible reflection, 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 artificial 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 first visit in the rain, arriving from the opposite direction).

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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 Dürer, 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. 42–4). 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 field of landscape architecture as those other revolutionaries – Rousseau, Robespierre, Saint-Just – were in politics. Little Sparta finds 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 find 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

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42 Finlay’s lettered plaque with the entwined initials ad (Albrecht Dürer’s monogram) recreates Dürer’s 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 Finlay’s gardens are as likely to be nonplussed as immediately appreciative, which irritates some of them no end. American design students, for example, have difficulty with ‘stiles’ because they don’t exist in the United States, and even as visitors to Great Britain they’d 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,

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45, 46 Two stiles at Little Sparta.

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fragments, excerpts & incompletions

and again on different versions of them at Fleur de l’Air, provide clues as to how the philosophical mode of the syllogism (thesis– antithesis–synthesis) 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. Chesterton’s 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

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47 Huff Lane at Little Sparta.

48 In the English Parkland, Little Sparta: two circular sets of stones with inscriptions from Virgil’s 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 first sight seem so – urns, slabs, broken architectural fragments; though upon closer inspection many of these are inscribed, they function in the first 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 l’Air 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 Goethe’s 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

56 fragments, excerpts & incompletions

49 Buried capital at Little Sparta.

remarks about lanes, prompts to the visitor to reflect 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 significance. 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, Finlay’s repetition of certain inscriptions and items in different locations underscores that they are to be deemed commonplaces: when we find 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 find along the main street of

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50 ‘man a passerby . . .’ at Little Sparta.

51 Sundial in Biggar, Lanarkshire.

the neighbouring town of Biggar (illus. 51) one of Finlay’s 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.

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fragments, excerpts & incompletions

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 identifies 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 Airfix kits.’1 They appear in several languages, maybe accompanied by English versions (illus. 61); they are sometimes identified as quotations or at other times left for us to attribute; and they are not always sufficiently 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 justification equally valid, and saw in Shenstone’s 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 Shenstone’s 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 Shenstone’s 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. 53–6). 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

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52 ‘From A Proposal for The Leasowes’, 1992, pamphlet, with Nicholas Sloan.

53–6 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.

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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 l’Air, 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 l’Air.

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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 significance, he certainly knew famous pictorial representations of it: in one of Nicolas Poussin’s 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 Finlay’s reliance upon this device. Thomas Gray’s ‘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 Gray’s, 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 Kojève’s 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 Finlay’s landscapes, and yet it is our privilege to be addressed by innumerable ideas and reflections. Some of these are things we know perfectly well; they are ‘in our consciousness’ already, yet we often need to be reminded of

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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 figures 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 Finlay’s 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 figure of Saint-Just lends to this large nostalgia for the Roman world. But its format more specifically alludes to one aspect of the antique culture – its use of inscriptions.5 Finlay first

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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 ‘fill’ 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

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61 The Latin from Virgil’s tenth Eclogue and its English renderings (‘Here are cool springs’ and ‘here soft meadows’) on ‘Virgil’s 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. Finlay’s 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

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to assume a specific and often rich significance. Yet in practice and on the ground, hints and prompts survive in a much more open field 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 finger on them. We can perhaps see this somewhat paradoxical garden process at work if we look more closely at some elements of Finlay’s last garden creation, Fleur de l’Air. Compared with Little Sparta, Fleur de l’Air 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 first 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 figure 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 fine 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 l’Air. 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 l’Air, 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, first 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 fig 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

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Sparta, but here most of the flowers 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 Finlay’s own imaginative response, even as he deliberately invokes famous, likeminded predecessors. Among these, Goethe figures prominently. A tree-plaque near the house cites Goethe’s 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: first (illus. 64) in the famous words of ‘Mignon’, inscribed on the square plinth of the white stone vase filled 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. Gilonis’s elaborate gloss on the significance of this item notes the French name is laurier d’Apollon,10 so we may also surely recognize the oblique homage to Finlay’s favourite deity, Apollo, now in his creative capacity of inspiring poets whose successes have been crowned with laurel, and therefore was traditionally associated

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62 The circle of the Muses at Fleur de l’Air, Provence (in December 2003.

63 A wooden seat at Fleur de l’Air inscribed with smooth-barked tree species. 64 A vase on the terrace near the house at Fleur de l’Air, with an inscription from Goethe (‘kennst du das land wo die zitronen bluhn’).

65 Fleur de l’Air. A second vase with a Goethe inscription, about myrtle and laurel (‘die myrte still und hoch der lorbeer steht’).

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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 l’Air’s 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 Virgil’s 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 l’Air 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 l’Air, with attendant cypresses.

67 One of the Eurydice stones, inscribed ‘eurydice the clouds / eurydice the oaks’).

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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 Pope’s ‘Ode for Musick upon St Cecilia’s Day’, which opens with an invitation to the Muses – ‘Descent ye Nine’. But the name of Eurydice, first 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 ‘l’ombra 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 l’Air.

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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 specific and recondite meanings. Yet their immediate effect within the Provençal 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 l’Air.

70 View down the slope through the olive terraces at Fleur de l’Air; the Eurydice stones can be seen by the cypresses, the top of the tempietto to their left.

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Bacchus and Apollo.12 But Petrarch’s already generalized language is further abstracted at Fleur de l’Air to offer a ‘composite Provence of the mind, and of the senses’13 more in keeping with this new garden than making any specific reference to Petrarch’s 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 l’Air (the aura, fragrance, coolness and the shade. cccxxvii petrarca).

The very format of presenting the inscription of these translations of Petrarch’s 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 Finlay’s 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 Provençal 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

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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 Finlay’s 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 sacrifice 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 l’Air, and a detail of its inscription (‘hom. od. xi’).

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74–6 Three of the fishing-vessel registration plaques set into an olive-terrace wall at Fleur de l’Air. ‘inconnu . . .’ ‘reve d’ete . . .’ ‘l’oiseau . . .’

Pistoia), but it is still sufficiently distant for homage to be paid to the ocean’s god. And so, as we return uphill towards the house, we’ll take note once again but more clearly of the significance of names and registration numbers of French fishing boats: ‘l’audacieux’, or ‘file au vent’ (illus. 74–6).

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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 l’Air 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 transfixes us, even if it does not fix or nail down a particular significance. 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 l’Air 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 defined 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

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77 The ‘Flock’ stones and ‘ha-ha’ at Stockwood Park, Luton.

and harmless must be challenged: hence ‘The lawn is the garden’s 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 Finlay’s gardens as gardens, rather than as places where he has placed examples of his other poetry that can be subject to confident 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 l’Air 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

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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.

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and violence of that event are for Finlay as unavoidable as are its achievements. Little Sparta insists more than most of Finlay’s 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 Kröller-Müller Museum (illus. 145) features names, the import of which may be doubtful. Such sibylline leavings are not, at least in the first instance, conducive to certainty and security. Fleur de l’Air, 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 serpent’s 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 scepticism’4) and that it occupies a central role in Finlay’s 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 durée 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 finally 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 specifically 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 first shown, less effectively, in the interior of the Victoria Miro Gallery in London in 1988.5 By definition, too, gardens are different, set apart, from more workaday surroundings; they often have distinct thresholds, the

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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 l’Air are crowned with both the traditional welcoming pineapple and the hand grenade (the first 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, baffling 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. Finlay’s sites, more than most, destabilize those who hope to find 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 find in gardens: plinths

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81 The gate piers in the Wild Garden, Little Sparta, with grenades (nicknamed ‘pineapples’) in place of finials.

and column bases around trees; dictionary redefinitions (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 fishing craft, but to warships and the warfare that has destroyed them; miniaturized aircraft carriers appear innocuously as bird-tables. Virgil’s Eighth Eclogue that apostrophizes the pastoral flute is now imaged by a machine gun (illus. 84) and the plaque’s 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 confidence in the making and experience of gardens underlies, I suggest, Finlay’s creative regard for them. From each of his gardens – Little Sparta, Fleur de l’Air, Stockwood Park, the Max Planck grounds or the grove at the Kröller-Müller – 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 find that we have their inscriptions in our consciousness long after we have left.

80 spaces full of doubt

Two redefinitions 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.

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8 ‘ . . . the hideous process of secularization’ Embark on a garden with a vision . . .

A major event in Finlay’s embattled rejection of much modern culture was the publication in 1986 of the National Trust’s gazetteer, Follies: A Guide. It is not a work that inspires much enthusiasm or any confidence 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 one’s nerves’.2 Yet Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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, Finlay’s refusal of the first implies a search for the second, and since the sacred has often implied a strong measure of sublime experience, the two are effectively linked. Finlay’s notion of the sacred, or what alternatively he would call ‘piety’,4 does not involve, it should be clear, any specifically 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

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themselves incomplete or empty of meaning. In Little Sparta is a stone representation of Pan’s 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 Finlay’s 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 identified 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 flute 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. Finlay’s 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 infinite 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 find 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 Finlay’s 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. Petrarch’s presence at Fleur de l’Air is signalled by three inscriptions (illus. 71) that draw from his writings essential elements of nature – waters, woods, rocks, fields, hills, fragrance,

86 ‘vnda’ at Little Sparta.

84 ‘ . . . the hideous process of secularization’

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 garden’s visitors to connect the poet’s 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 l’Air also make play with the generalized litany of woods, floods, 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, fire and water’; we take tree species for granted (or simply don’t distinguish between them), or we don’t really consider the true meaning of words. Finlay takes such unreflective 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 redefinition 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

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87 Inscription by the irrigation basin at Fleur de l’Air: ‘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 redefinition 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 reified in the stone arch before us. The sacred is then a complex aspect of Finlay’s 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 significance. But despite Blake’s 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 André Roger may well insist that ‘En lui-meme, le génie du lieu n’existe pas’ (‘in itself, the genius of place doesn’t 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 Barrès, who in his La Colline inspirée of 1912 wrote of ‘des lieux oû souffle l’esprit . . . qui tirent l’âme de sa léthargie, des lieux enveloppés, baignés de mystère, élus de toute éternité pour être le siège de l’émotion 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. Forster’s short story ‘The Road From Colonus’ will surely understand what Barrès, for all his incantatory prose, was getting at: that places do reach out

86 ‘ . . . the hideous process of secularization’

88 The setting of ‘bring back the birch’ in the Front Garden at Little Sparta.

Redefinition 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 Finlay’s 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.

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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 Finlay’s passionate dedication to the sea, even in land-locked terrain like Little Sparta, Fleur de l’Air 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 Finlay’s 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 first 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 sea’s importance goes beyond the personal; biography does not explain why its tides flow and ebb through many of Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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

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91 Tree plaque at Little Sparta: ‘mare nostrum’. 92 Boats drawn up on shore of the Lochan, Little Sparta.

93 ‘Nuclear Sail’, Little Sparta.

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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 fishing-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 sea’s waves | the waves’ sheaves | the sea’s naves And in the English Parkland is a wooden bridge that crosses the stream flowing down from Lochan Eck, and on it is the inscription that connects (as bridges also do) the flow 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 individual’s 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, ‘Camouflaged Flowers’, at Little Sparta.

95 An aircraft-carrier bird-table beside the Temple Pool, Little Sparta.

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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 fulfils yet another agenda in Finlay’s garden poetry by reminding us that nature is violent and savage. Throughout Finlay’s allusions to the sea and to those that sail on her sound the notes of loss and disaster, like the torpedoed corvettes or the fishing boats that, recalled only by their registrations, are ghostly presences – were they lost or are they still afloat? One of the most poignant of Finlay’s gestures towards both sea and loss was first 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 day’s 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

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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 fire, 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 figure 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-god’s presence is endlessly intimated. In one of Finlay’s 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 Virgil’s Aeneid. Contemporary visitors to Stourhead made much of its ‘Ocean’, even its representations of river-gods, and a modern commentator notes the eighteenth century’s recognition that the protected waters of lakes like that at Stourhead were ‘associated, by contrast, with the storms of public immorality’ and that Stourhead’s creator, Henry Hoare, was himself a connoisseur of storm paintings. Finlay has different modes of highlighting ‘public immorality’ and the artist’s 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.

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10 Et in Arcadia Ego aye, aye, death is even in Arcadia george iii

Arcady, along with its inhabitants, is everywhere in Finlay’s imagination, and so, inevitably, much also in his gardens. What seems at first sight just an abandoned and shattered column lying in the English Parkland offers to define it – ‘arcadia n. a kingdom in sparta’s 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 fields 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 flowery mead below; among the flowers 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 finds 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 Panofsky’s 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 Guercino’s case, also a prominently displayed skull. While the earlier

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97 A close-up of the ‘arcadia n. a kingdom in sparta’s neighbourhood’ column.

98 ‘Of Famous Arcady Ye Are’, 1977, poster with Michael Harvey.

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99 Tortoise as Panzer Leader in the Front Garden at Little Sparta.

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 significance. 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 Poussin’s pastoral landscape. First we see its turret and a stencilled death’s head, then the tomb is shown changed into the shape of a whole tank, built of stone blocks (camouflaged as a blockhouse?), and finally the tank, now represented as a fully fighting machine, makes two appearances – one with the Italian words ‘Ancora in Arcadia Morte’ painted on its flank and the double lightning flash of the German ss-Panzer Division on its turret, the second without the lightning flashes 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 reconfigurations – 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 horrific 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 find 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.

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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 artist’s 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. Virgil’s 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, Claude’s 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 Pan’s 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 flower names; the terror along with the pastoral of the French Revolution – like honeysuckle growing on a guillotine pergola in one of Finlay’s 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.

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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

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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 Finlay’s Christmas cards (1966) showed the only too familiar landscape of Stourhead, one of the National Trust’s flagship gardens. Inside was printed what purported to be a dictionary definition: ‘(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’, modified by the bracketed ‘Classical’, is defined 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 (it’s 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 first century bc). But ‘stand’ manipulates the definition 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,

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there’s 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 garden’s creator, Henry Hoare, would have discovered through the printed medium of an engraved book illustration (a process of inspiration so reminiscent of Finlay’s 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. Finlay’s 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 stifling, 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

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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 figures – 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 Shenstone’s 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 Finlay’s own proposal for an inscription, taken verbatim from Dodsley’s contemporary description of Shenstone’s 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

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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 Wright’s Universal Architecture of 1775 on the use of an obelisk ‘suited to a Situation commanding an extensive Prospect’.5 Finlay’s 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 Hussein’s 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 Shenstone’s garden with contemporary issues. Finlay shared and acknowledged Shenstone’s limited financial 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 Finlay’s emphatic rejection of any merely historical importance in past art works: ‘I don’t feel a distance between me and the classical.’6 Finlay must also have appreciated, even as he sought to reinterpret it, Shenstone’s specific landscape reference to Virgil. The eighteenth-century gardenist endorsed the insertion of items into gardens as a means ‘to connect ideas . . . [and] convey reflections of the pleasing kind’ (as Shenstone himself put it in ‘Unconnected Sentences’). Thus in a part of his ground that he called Virgil’s Grove Shenstone paid tribute to a fellow poet, James Thomson, by inscribing one of his benches with lines from Virgil’s Fifth Eclogue. The quotation worked in exactly the ways that Finlay has followed

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two hundred years later: the Latin collapsed the distance between Virgil’s time and Thomson’s 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 ‘whisp’rings 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 find a bronze wheelbarrow dedicated to Shenstone. While its form may seem vaguely old-fashioned, its obvious resemblance to the modern garden version emphasizes Finlay’s pleasure in both its practicality and its modernity (illus. 103) and suggests that the earlier gardener’s 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 Finlay’s inscribed tree columns perhaps) being dedicated to Newton, Descartes, Voltaire, William Penn, Montesquieu and Rousseau for their advocacy (respectively) of light, nature’s 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 Shenstone’s ‘Unconnected Sentences’ and Dodsley’s description of his gardens, so Girardin’s landscape was available to Finlay through two texts: Girardin’s 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 final 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 Genève 1712–1778’. And the first garden segment to the

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103 The ‘arcadia’ column and Shenstone wheelbarrow in the English Parkland, Little Sparta.

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104 Ermenonville: The Temple of Modern Virtue, 1775.

visitors’ left is called ‘Julie’s Garden’, recalling the heroine of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. 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 unfinished at his death in 1778 the movingly titled work, Les Rêveries 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 Panthéon 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 first time by Michel Baridon, who jokingly remarked that Rousseau ‘must have been the first 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 Baridon’s 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 ‘L’Ile des Peupliers’, and recalls his first burial place; while a small stone in the shape of Robert’s 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 Finlay’s landscape proposals from very early on in his designs for gardens and landscapes. But the

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105 Rousseau’s 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 Finlay’s 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 first 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 Finlay’s case what distinguish his neo-classicism are its self-imposed severity and his acknowledgement that even while

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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 first 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 Finlay’s distinctive contributions to landscape design’s renewal of a Neoclassical mode.

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12 Revolutions . You cannot step into the same Revolution twice

107 Tree-column bases, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands.

Though it is a crucial element of Finlay’s 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, first principles, the French Revolution appealed to ideas of nature uncorrupted by contemporary culture. One account of its historical significance must certainly insist upon its high idealism, its dedication to fundamental human rights and its nostalgia for an ancient Roman republicanism. The flip-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 Kröller-Müller (illus. 145) and again at Little Sparta trees are dignified with column bases inscribed with the names of Rousseau, Robespierre, Corot and Michelet (plus the

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108 A tree-column base in shadow, Little Sparta.

classical lawgiver, Lycurgus of Sparta). The simple dignity by which these historical figures are honoured links them unforgettably to the uprightness of nature’s most crucial item, the tree.2 But the values that each of these revolutionary figures represents within Finlay’s landscape repertoire need to be clarified. 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 l’Air, two bronze busts of the French writer on stone plinths are among the final 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 l’Air.

But Finlay also cherished Rousseau for other emblematic moments that are recounted in his autobiographical Confessions.4 At Little Sparta there is a finger-post marked ‘vincennes’, an insertion that has its origins in the Wild Hawthorn Press 5 Signposts of 1989 and that refers to Rousseau’s own account of walking towards

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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 purification of morals. Finlay’s 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 Rousseau’s Confessions. Yet the determination of Rousseau’s vision on that momentous occasion – to re-establish knowledge and learning in the interests of enabling a revolution of morality – is Finlay’s 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 L’Idylle 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 ‘materialized’5 into a design for a grove of ‘gean or wild cherry trees’ in the midst of which rises a short, fluted column bearing a ‘bronze or stone basket’ of cherries inscribed with the title, as one might find it within a real bosquet (illus. 110). One realization of this proposal will be discovered by the attentive visitor to

110 An opening of L’Idylle des Cerises, with Michael Harvey, 1986.

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111 An opening of Un Jardin Révolutionnaire. 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 Julie’s Garden. Another actual bosquet projected but, sadly, never materialized for the Hôtel des Menus Plaisirs at Versailles also cited Rousseau’s cherry trees. This ‘Jardin Révolutionaire’ (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 l’invariable justice et l’indestructible 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 l’Air (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

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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 fierce but just regime could combat weakness of will and sloppy adherence to high ideals. Robespierre invoked a Spartan virtue in justification 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 flute-player.6 But he also would

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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 Bibliothèque 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 Finlay’s own new perspectives on the Revolution, while his contemporary, Corot, seems more immediately relevant when it is a question of finding ways to reconfigure how a modern garden-maker can redo French neo-classical landscapes like Claude’s and Poussin’s 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 Finlay’s much-used dictionary definitions 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 profit 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 Finlay’s definition of revolution a couple of intimations of landscape art – a renewal’s ‘improvement’ of a country, rediscovering its ‘capabilities’ à 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 d’Eglantine, a Jacobin poet who was also a victim of the guillotine. He is recognized both by

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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, Pluviôse is the month of rain, Thermidor, that of heat; saints’ days were reconfigured as flowers 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 fish 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 flowers that their labours make available to them. It is sometimes difficult 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 first is a stern refusal – exemplified 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-Just’s ‘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 Finlay’s purpose here as marking the ‘thou-

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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’. 114 A close-up of the ‘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 Ovid’s 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 Ovid’s text, ‘Saint-Just et l’Antiquité’, Mignet’s history of the French Revolution, Walter Pater’s essay on Apollo and the art historian Rudolf Wittkower, who had written on Bernini’s 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 one’s Blackberry it might, courtesy of the internet, be possible in the future, though wireless reception is significantly 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 Ovid’s tale moves through metamorphosis to stasis, with the shy republic transformed into laurel (like the Revolutionary calendar) before she can be violently raped, Finlay’s attitude seems nicely calibrated to put the onus for judgement upon his garden visitors. Later in the garden the steel silhouettes that represent this Ovidian–Revolutionary parable are also held in a timeless moment (Bernini’s 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 Finlay’s constant refusal to let visitors forget that nature’s 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 Rousseau’s flirtation with the young girls in his cherry idyll, the materialization of which is found in various modified forms in Finlay landscapes, is somewhat different from Apollo’s frantic pursuit of

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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 modified 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 modified Roman triumphal arches, towards a small Neoclassical temple on an island

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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 refigured 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 purified 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 nature’s impersonal terrors. The double lightning strike assumed as the insignia of the hated German ss recurs through much of Finlay’s meditations, whether on the page or in a landscape, as a symbol of nature’s (including human nature’s) intractable capacity for destruction and death. He explained its significance 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, significantly, 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 classified by the local rating authority as a temple rather than a gallery.13 Finlay fought to

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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 influential role in the French Revolution which is important to me.’ But the defining aspect for the visitor who confronts the French Revolution in one of Finlay’s gardens is that the garden itself acquires revolutionary significance; 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 Thomson’s 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 final paragraph, however, the challenge posed by this view of Finlay’s garden as itself the Revolution.

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13 Errata, or recovered in translation Camouflage 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 camouflage’ 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, first. 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 ‘aʅor’ into ‘oar’; at the level of concepts, that are serviceable once they have been reformulated by playing with a dictionary [re-]definition; 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 Dürer, 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

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work has it) Metamophoses, takes the natural world as their stage and material. Makers of Renaissance gardens appreciated the aptness of Ovid’s 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 d’Este 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 Ovid’s 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 Finlay’s garden poetry draws upon these metamorphic traditions, finding 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 fulfils many of Finlay’s 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

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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 defiant gesture, as it is certainly the park’s 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 façade 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 reflect more accessible and contemporary associations: for daphne read laurel

for philomela read nightingale

Another pair seems to make it all bafflingly 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

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errata, or recovered in translation

117 The ‘Errata of Ovid’ exedral wall at Stockwood Park, Luton. 118 A close-up of the lettering of one of the ‘Errata of Ovid’ exedra.

objects: bush, bird or stream. Many of the poem’s 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 Psyche’s 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 we’re 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

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119 Double tree-columnbase at Stockwood Park, Luton.

as visitors wander further in the parkland they’ll find a way to confirm 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, they’d 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 Quatremère 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 Hincks’s 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

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errata, or recovered in translation

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 definition that reads: ‘flock, n. a number of a kind, an amplitude’. Below it, the inscription continues with a quotation from Edward Zeller’s 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 flock, which may not leave its fold without the consent of the gods. Zeller. We might have expected to see sheep grazing in the fields beyond the ha-ha of an English country estate; but this is now a municipal public park, so another erratum is needed, and for ‘flock of real sheep’ we must now read ‘blocks of stone’. The joke

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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 flock 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 l’Air, 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 first 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 Park’s 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 profit 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 flying under the radar and learning to appreciate what it’s doing in opposition to conventional parks and gardens.

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Stockwood Park is in fact juxtaposed to an old eighteenthcentury walled garden, first 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 specifically 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 Finlay’s 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

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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 bird’s-eye view (illus. 123). Another, also imaged by the bird’seye 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 Pope’s 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 specific 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 visitor’s experience in entering his parkland is exercised by Finlay’s deployment of sculpture. The visitor may assume at first 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 1985–6 one of the ‘Detached Sentences on Public Space’ (illus. 19) reads: ‘Every summer, in Europe’s “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, Finlay’s insertions into the

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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 Zeller’s gloss on the Pythagorean notion of men as flocks – ‘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 modified 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

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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 ‘l’astringenza 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 Sloan’s drawing of ‘a plough of the Roman sort . . . ’, from Finlay’s A Celebration of the Grove (1984). 126 Sloan’s 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 Finlay’s fascination with camouflage. 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 flute – 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 camouflaged, but nonetheless recognizable. The play with camouflage may best be understood as an aspect of Finlay’s 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 camouflage, like any military outfit (the inside is aptly blank).

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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, first 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 camouflage, however, once the disguise has been penetrated, we tend to be able to see the tree and the Dryad as alternating figures.

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Finlay enjoys camouflage both for its changeful, metamorphic opportunities and for its military uses.12 Camouflage disguises soldiers or their equipment (as also fighter 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 infiltrate 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 camouflaged 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 camouflaged 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 camouflaged 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 camouflage patches.

128 Camouflaged fruit canes at Little Sparta.

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The block engraved with a definition of ‘flock’ in Stockwood Park is a characteristic Finlay device, which partakes both of metamorphosis and camouflage: 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; camouflage, because either the redefinitions, linguistic and material, sneak in a fresh idea under the guise of something we did not think about before, or the definition plucks away the disguise of convention to reveal a new meaning, just as persons sitting on the blocks camouflage 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 redefinitions 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 Finlay’s 1984 proposal for the Virgilian Wood was what he called ‘A Concise Celle Dictionary’,13 containing seven definitions 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 specific site, as Seven Definitions Pertaining to Ideal Landscape; some have since been placed in other gardens.14 Among the words redefined 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 Definitions as ‘grove, n. an irregular peristyle’, but without Stukeley’s illustration of the temple. Others words redefined in 1989 were ‘shadow’, ‘volute’, ‘horizon’, ‘improve’, ‘olive’ and finally ‘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’ redefinition 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 redefinition returns us to the natural world with ‘a form subsisting in

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the tree bark’). ‘improve’, now defined as ‘italicize’, was linked to an extract from a reported conversation between William Shenstone and James Thomson on a poet’s contributions to landscape improvements at The Leasowes. Seven Definitions 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 Finlay’s battles with Strathclyde Region, is the card where the façade of Little Sparta’s 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 definitions get inserted verbatim into Finlay’s landscapes; the obvious exception is ‘olive’, redefined as ‘a mean term’ for its middling place in Hawkins’s 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. Alberti’s ‘volute’ reminds us of architecture’s debts to the natural world of woodland; Coleridge’s ‘horizon’ and Virgil’s ‘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-definition inscription.

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aries of human life). Many of these, and more, are reused with great effect at Little Sparta: the ‘shadow’ definition 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 redefinitions become far more richly nuanced by their now finding 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 fields. 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 specifically acknowledges this dilemma of gardenmakers and landscape architects. He hails ‘Capability’ Brown both

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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 Finlay’s 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 isn’t to be noticed as picturesque until that word on a sloping fence-rail suggests that it might be. Some of Finlay’s 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.

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14 ‘Mower is Less’ ‘silenzio dopo il chiacchiero’ (silence after chatter)

Once we have quickly acknowledged the wit of Finlay’s 1973 upending of Mies van der Rohe’s 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 reflections: one revolves around the apparent reversal of Mies’s minimalism, the other around the punning substitution of ‘mower’ for ‘more’. Mower, first. By itself, without benefit 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 grass’1). 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 efficient, less strenuous, less subtle, but (above all) less involved because simply intervening mechanically.

130 Mower is Less, 1973, card.

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As regards Mies, Finlay’s 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 Mies’s 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 filled certain parts of Little Sparta with a density of both planting and sculptural insertions in ways that suggest he could not abide Mies’s 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 Finlay’s 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 fields 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 fields 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 artifice 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 howsoe’er the figures do excel The gods themselves with us do dwell.

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‘mower is less’

While it is hard to know how we should take the Mower as Marvell’s spokesman, he does have a strong case to make, more in keeping with Finlay’s celebration of Arcady and its inhabitants, and not unlike Blake’s harsh rebuke to those who could emptily symbolize or rationalize away genius loci. One thing that Marvell’s 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 Finlay’s own neo-classical rearmament as applied to gardens. Certainly the piety of The Mower’s hymn to ‘willing nature [that] does to all dispense / A wild and fragrant innocence’ climes with Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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. Finlay’s frequent recourse to sundials and benches is typical of the possibilities he can garner from ordinary, simple effects (illus. 53–6, 151–2). 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 l’Air, and one of the latest sectors of the former now includes an English ‘lane’ that does not, as expected, waste time or space by

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140 ‘mower is less’

meandering (illus. 47). His fondness for working in ‘found’ olive plantations, in woodland groves (the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Brittany3), in churchyards (St George’s, 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. Finlay’s 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 field of landscape architecture that less is more after all.

131 A Fleur de l’Air stile.

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15 A solid place . . . a tangible image of goodness and sanity far from the now-fashionable poetry of anguish and self

If, in the final resort, I am still flummoxed by how to take Finlay’s 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 confidence that they are more concrete and more secure than other places, well defined 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 Greeks’1). There is an analogy here with his confidence 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 find. 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 Finlay’s 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 deflecting 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 Finlay’s own personality does not shine through or declare itself throughout his œuvre (it’s doubtful that you’d 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 firmly within certain schemes of both neo-classicism and

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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 reader’s and the visitor’s 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 visitor’s 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 Surrealism’s 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 Poussin’s Arcadian shepherds (let alone Poussin’s patrons or his modern scholars), but more likely to be Gray’s and Gainsborough’s 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 George’s 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!

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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 gardener’s 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 flowers 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 gardener’s 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 defined and the gardener’s province clearly marked out. Fences and the like keep things out, but they also serve to emphasize whatever is within a garden’s specific 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

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134 The stony path towards Little Sparta, glimpsed at the upper right.

135 A column at Little Sparta.

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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 confirm 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 visitor’s approach to the grove at the Kröller-Müller 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 l’Air 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 find 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

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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 garden’s ‘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.

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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 Finlay’s 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 world’s true place2 Though she acknowledges the physical elements of the contained garden, she otherwise moves to make a much more strenuous claim for Finlay’s 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 Homer’s 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 Finlay’s 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 doesn’t 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 poet’s version of the so-called intentional fallacy: on the one

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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 significance his garden art may hold for the future. How, as Yeats put it, will Finlay’s 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 five 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, finally, 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 Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s garden art offers here is its plenitude of significance, its determination not to be mono-vocal or homogeneous, above all not to be one artist’s ‘poetic “self-extensions”’.7

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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 Dürer, 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 sacrificing 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 Finlay’s commentary, an invitation for visitors to occupy that large space between nature and Nature with their own thoughts.8

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Another way of appreciating the significance of this plenitude and range of meanings in his garden worlds is to remember how Finlay’s 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 fields, 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 artifice to nature as we move further from the house. At Fleur de l’Air, 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

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137 Edge of the Temple Pool, Little Sparta.

138 The English Parkland, Little Sparta.

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139 The bridge at Fleur de l’Air.

140 The trellised, wooden pergola, ‘inter artes et naturum’, at Little Sparta.

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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 l’Air 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: Dido’s 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 unfinished 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 specifically 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 cliché 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 modified, 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

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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) refining 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 fields until it finally 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 first 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 gepflügte Land . the fluted land’ (illus. 142). Then, at the far edge of the property, visitors come upon a series of dry-stone walls, at first sight in the form of a sheepfold, but upon closer inspection

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141 The Goose Hut, Little Sparta.

142 The inscription on the inside of the gate at the entrance to Little Sparta (‘das gepflügte Land . the fluted 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 fields 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

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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 first 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 ‘fluted 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 – gepflügte may sound like a version of fluted but it actually means ‘cared for’, while Land may contain our English word land but in German also signifies a politically defined territory. So the vision of fields beyond the closed gate stimulates an understanding of different ways in which land is used by humans; and, of course, the sound of the ‘flute’ announces the entrance to Pan’s 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 infinite distance seeks local definition. We need the two so as to understand the full significance 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 field and horizon. Scale always involves being able to draw comparisons, and Finlay’s 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 Apollo’s golden head is huge; the conning tower of the nuclear submarine smaller than we’d 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 we’ve already seen, is characterized more by its rough and rugged insertions. So the temple was removed, to find subsequently its ideal setting in

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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 definition 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 Circe’s hair / Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials’14), 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 understood’15). 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 find 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

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144 The re-sited Apollo Temple, in woodland in the grounds of a private house in Scotland.

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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 significance. 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. Finlay’s 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 Kröller-Müller] affirm 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 Finlay’s tree columns, and other recollections (‘recall’ is a highly personal, not to say often casual, affair). His landscapes offer this more flexible model: dense and richly conceived out of an intense and autodidactic imagination, his installations provide endless opportunities for others to find in them associations, ideas,

145 The ‘Sacred Grove’ at the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

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messages and even injunctions for direct action. Some of these will be in tune with what Finlay himself might have explained; others will be modified in the guts of the living, and transformation was one of Finlay’s 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 Kröller-Müller what we intuit might coincide with what Heidegger explained but still lack the vocabulary to explain it. One of Finlay’s major efforts in his garden poetry has been to extend our vocabulary – all those redefinitions, quotations, games with words – in order that we may enjoy a fuller response by being able to explain it. Nonetheless, Finlay’s 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, flowers 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

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preternatural, what the dictionary defines as ‘outside the ordinary course of nature’, though still in touch with it.21 This was the garden revolution he proposed. Finlay’s 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 gardening’s practicalities and its pieties; the insistence on the violence of nature and on its beneficent 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 fight 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 I’m 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 final commitment to one mode over another, neither Brown nor Le Nôtre. 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 camouflages 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 flourishes (sundials, like church bells, were once the available time-pieces).

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146 The Woodland Garden at Little Sparta.

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147 The front garden at Little Sparta.

Perhaps his two most provocative design strategies have been, first, 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 today’s 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 field. 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. Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s recourse to this device has obvious

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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. Finlay’s (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 affirm 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 flat 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 Finlay’s 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. Finlay’s 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

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148 Tree plaque with text from Virgil’s 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 rectified – into many other private and public sites like Fleur de l’Air and Stockwood Park, into parkland that, while privately owned, is open to the public (Max Planck Institut, Kröller-Müller), and in garden festivals. He is further represented in collections where his ‘sculptures’ depend heavily upon their insertion in specific landscapes (the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail, the Serpentine Gallery, Celle, San Diego, St George’s Churchyard in Bristol, and quite a few German sites); in addition, there are a variety of urban installations in both Glasgow and

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149 The stile installed as part of the Glasgow Garden Festival, 1988.

Edinburgh.27 His whole œuvre finds him returning again and again to certain themes and issues, but always with the aim of finding 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 modernism’s 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 find 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 don’t 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 Pagé the year before the exhibition of his work that she organized at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1987 was in effect another set of ‘unconnected sentences’, now

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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 final 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 confident 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. Cézanne, too, famously remarked that he wanted to ‘make nature over again after Poussin’. Finlay (who adapted Cézanne’s remark for an exhibition of his own in 1980–81) 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. Finlay’s 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 d’Este, 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

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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 find 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 identified with garden art. Finlay had been much interested in several German Romantic writers (the Schlegels, Novalis, Hölderlin), 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 d’Este, 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 codified, as a progression from learned emblematic structures in gardens to more modern, democratic and flexible 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 defined expressive power; or, conversely, arranging for the expressive potential of a site to carry emblematic meaning.

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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 defined 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, battlefields, the ocean), along with both their dramatis personae (Pan, Apollo, Saint-Just, Rousseau) and their machinery (panzers, fishing-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 significance: otherwise called the spirit of place. In each of Finlay’s major landscape interventions – Stockwood Park, Celle, St George’s in Bristol, the Max Planck Institut, Fleur de l’Air – 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-Just’s 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 specific 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 there’36 – the bells of Durham Cathedral, the Portland stone quarry and its adjacency to the English Channel,

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Shenstone’s 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 Virgil’s Eclogues (in both Latin and English), translations from Janácek’s 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 Janácek 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 find, 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 defined 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 flowers, plants, trees, water and so on’.37 His instinct for abstraction and generalities works paradoxically through very specific 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 final paragraph. Over the years Finlay’s gardens have been recorded by a number of photographers: Andrew Lawson,

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151, 152 General views of St George’s, Brandon Hill, Bristol.

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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 d’Este, Pope’s Twickenham, Shenstone’s The Leasowes or Ermenonville first 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 Finlay’s landscapes reveal both their sensory forms and their role as medium for larger ideas and concerns. But we also need to experience them at first 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.

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Appendix

Oblique views of Little Sparta, Lanarkshire and Fleur de l’Air, Provence by gary hincks

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178 appendix

179

180 appendix

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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, 1972–1995, ed. Zdenek Felix and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 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 Bann’s learned essay in Ian Hamilton Finlay, Inter Artes et Naturam, exh. cat., Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1987). Or there is Michael Bath’s essay, ‘Mobilizing the Gap: Hamilton Finlay’s Inheritance’, Glasgow Emblem Studies, 10 (2005), pp. 113–28, which begins in the garden of Little Sparta, that is said to ‘reflect’ Finlay’s preoccupation with ‘symbolic images’ and ‘monumental inscriptions’, but soon leaves it to pursue those concerns outside the physical constraints of the garden’s setting. 6 Rosemarie E. Pahlke in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, ed. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 1997), p. 274.

1 Words of a dead poet . . . 1 See my more extended meditation on this installation, ‘vnda Pacifica’, in special issue of the New Arcadian Journal (Autumn 2007). There are several other instances of Finlay’s 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 Plutarch’s Work, ed. L De Zlais et al. (London, 2004), pp. 43–55. On Finlay’s 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. 90–96, 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, 1925–2006 (Dunsyre,2007). 2 Other versions of this may be found in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963– 1997: Druckgrafik, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 1997), 4.87.7,4.92.2 and 3,4.92.4. 3 This remark occurs in Finlay’s proposal of 1979 for the Lothian Estates, Monteviot, reprinted by the New Arcadians in Mr Aislabies’ Gardens (May

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1981), n. p., discussed in the next paragraph. 4 Stephen Bann makes the point that this was the first 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. 248–9. 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), specifically pp. 171–5. 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 Gilonis’s note on plates 28 and 29 in ‘Fleur de l’Air’: 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. 8–17. 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. 16–30. 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 Finlay’s 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 Shenstone’s as an appendix to an essay in the New Arcadian Journal, 53–4 (2002), pp. 107–8.

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references

3 There are two possible explanations for this change of title. Harry Gilonis has suggested to me that Finlay derived it from Charles Lamb’s 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 Shenstone’s ‘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, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, ed. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 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 briefly in the final 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 unified 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 Gilonis’s commentary in Works in Europe, 1972–1995, ed. Zdenek Felix and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 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 Finlay’s booklet of Antoine Watteau’s painting, Embarquement pour Cythère, 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 Christ’s crucifixion and so necessarily have a predetermined and necessary sequence of events. 7 I have examined the garden’s 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. 328–41, 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 (Liège, 1977), p. 7, my italics (‘son jardin, un livre que l’on ne peut feuilleter mais ou il fait bon s’arreter 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 Bann’s suggestion that we

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explore Little Sparta as a ‘sequence of pages’ in a book. To which it may be answered that Sterne’s 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 Sterne’s, 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 Toby’s 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. 111–34, and in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis, mn, 2000), pp. 100–29. 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. 106–7. 15 John Constable’s Correspondence, ed. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich, 1968), pp. 77–8. 16 I first encountered Finlay’s 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 Provençal terraces has considerably augmented their significance. 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. 40–41. 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. 43–4) 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. 295–320, which is the version (there are two) that Finlay used. See also the discussion below, pp. 94–8. 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. 274–87. See Poursuites révolutionnaires / 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 Finlay’s 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 Stewart’s remark that Finlay’s Little Sparta is ‘within the edge of Roman dominion, between the walls

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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. 132–43. 10 See commentary on the photographs in ‘Fleur de l’Air’: 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 1994–5, Nicolas Poussin, 1594–1665, p. 409. 12 For a recent analysis of Petrarch’s gardens, see Raffaella Fabiano Giannetto, Medici Gardens: From Making to Design, Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture (Philadelphia, pa, 2008), pp. 99–115. 13 ‘Fleur de l’Air’, 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 Plato’s 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. 187–8, from Mary Ellen Solt’s 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 confidence 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.

8 ‘ . . . the hideous process of secularization’ 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. 227–62. 2 Published by Jonathan Cape, p. 492; the text goes on to complain that these are not ‘macho’. For some of Finlay’s ripostes, see Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 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.6–8. 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.

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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. 85–93. 5 Augustin Berque et al., Mouvance: cinquante mots pour le paysage (Paris, 1999), p. 67. 6 Barthes, Oeuvres complètes, 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. 198–200. 3 James Turner, ‘The Structure of Henry Hoare’s Stourhead’, Art Bulletin, lxi (1979), p. 75. Turner’s article (pp. 68–74) makes much of the oceanic significance 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 Hadfield 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 final sentence of illus. 28: ‘Hadfield 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.295–320; the ‘Footnotes’ are reproduced in Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay: A Visual Primer [1985], 2nd edn (London, 1992), pp. 245–7, having first 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. 29–30 above. 4 Pahlke’s commentary in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 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 Pan’s ‘crook is an offensive weapon’ (p. 241). 7 Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, 4.87.11 (p. 124). And see Wolfgang Ollrich, ‘Shooting Practice in Arcadia: “Hiertenlied” (“Shepherd’s 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. 110–17. 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 Finlay’s Contribution to the English Neo-Classical Tradition’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, 13 (1993), pp. 104–24; Patrick Eyres, ‘Ian Hamilton Finlay and the Cultural Politics of Neo-Classical Gardening’, Journal of Garden History, xxviii/1 (2000), pp. 152–66.

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11 [Neo-]classical landscapes 1 See Kenneth Woodbridge, Landscape and Antiquity: Aspects of English Culture at Stourhead, 1718–1838 (Oxford, 1970), figures 4a and 5. 2 This is the important lesson taught by Robert Rosenblum’s 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. 42–59. See also Promenade; ou, Itinèraire des Jardins d’Ermononville (Paris, 1788; reprinted2006). For The Leasowes, the best account is still the contemporary one (see following note). Finlay’s bench for The Leasowes is illustrated in Works in Europe, 1972–1995, ed. Zdenek Felix and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 1995) [with notes in English and German by Harry Gilonis and introduction by John Dixon Hunt]. 4 Quoted here from Dodsley’s ‘Description of the Leasowes’, in Shenstone’s The Works in Verse and Prose, 3 vols, 5th edn (London, 1777), vol. ii, p. 291. Shenstone’s ‘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 first of Swains, The soothest Shepherd that e’er pip’d on Plains’. 5 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), vi.6. 6 Spoken in an interview with Nagy Rashwan, Jacket, 15 (December 2001): see http://jacketmagazine.com/15/rash-iv-finlay.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. 288–93. 9 For the design, see ‘From Book to Garden and Back’, vii.1, in the format of a Christmas card (2002). 10 For the first of these, see Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 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. 97–104) 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. 156–75, have written on Finlay’s Revolutionary interests, which certainly greatly exceed the scope of his garden art, even while being essential to it. 2 On the significance more generally of the tree for Finlay, see Francis Edeline, ‘L’Abre qui cache la fôret’, Art & Fact, 17 (1998), pp. 86–91. 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. 110–17) writes of a Finlay work, a sickle lettered ‘Revolution, a continuation of pastoral by other means’. 4 See ‘From Book to Garden and Back: Ian Hamilton Finlay. Four Essays

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and an Exhibition Catalogue’, special issue of Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal / Visual Enquiry, xxi/4 (2005), pp. 349–51 and 354–5, for more details of Finlay’s publications that invoke Rousseau’s life. On the cancelled Versailles project, see Gavin Keeney, ‘A Revolutionary Arcadia: Reading Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Un Jardin Révolutionnaire’, Word & Image, xi (1995), pp. 237–55. 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 difficult and ambiguous figure: 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 Finlay’s 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. Palmer’s collective biography of the Committee of Public Safety, The Twelve who Ruled (1941; reprinted 1971 and 1989). 8 The print of this definition is in Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 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 confine myself to what helps us respond within the gardens themselves. He does note that the definition 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, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, 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. 85–93. 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 Finlay’s 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

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Imagination, 1600–1750 (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. 4 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), pp. 296–8 and 359–62; and Ian Hamilton Finlay: Prints, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 1997), 5.864 (pp. 108–9). See also ‘A People’s Arcadia’, New Arcadian Journal, 33–4 (1992), pp. 62–106, 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 flock 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 Finlay’s 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 Finlay’s 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. 148–51. 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, ‘Réflexions sur le camouflage’, Art & Fact, 7 (1988), pp. 129–33. 13 These are reprinted in Barilli et al., Art in Arcadia. The whole set of Definitions, 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, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, 4.89.6 (pp. 156–9); 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. 2 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), iv.3. 3 This site is illustrated in Works in Europe, 1972–1995, ed. Zdenek Felix and Pia Simig Hunt (Ostfildern, 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.

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2 See ‘From Book to Garden and Back: Ian Hamilton Finlay. Four Essays and an Exhibition Catalogue’, special issue of Word & Image: A Journal of 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 finding an outlet for it; civic virtue only when one’s will is expressing itself in productive action’: ‘City planning and civic consciousness’, New Boston, ii/1 (1911), pp. 7–8.

16 Gardens matter 1 I.H.F. in an interview with Francis Edeline, in his Ian Hamilton Finlay: gnomique et gnomonique (Liège, 1977), p. 53 (‘je me demande si les poètes eux-mêmes 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. 36–7. 3 Finlay to Paul Crowther (‘Ian Hamilton Finlay: Classicism, Piety and Nature’, Art and Design, May 1994, p. 92). Cf. both Michel Baridon’s ‘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 specific 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 difficult 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, 1963–1997: Druckgrafik, ed. Rosemarie E. Pahlke and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 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., Musée d’Art 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

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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 Finlay’s 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. 91–2. 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 America’s 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, 1972–1995, ed. Zdenek Felix and Pia Simig (Ostfildern, 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 ‘reflection’ of ‘a tranquil Italian courtyard garden with an interpretation of classical hard landscaping, that befits the Grand Tour theme’ (quoting from Press Release of 15 February 2005). 31 The letter is reprinted at the end of the museum’s 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 Unfinished. Essays Presented to Robin Middleton, ed. Barry Bergdoll and Werner Oechslin (London, 2006). For some literary perspective, Mark Scroggins in Jacket (jacketmagazine.com/15/finlay-by-scroggins.html). 33 I have discussed this crucial démarche in garden theory and practice in my ‘Emblem and Expression in the 18th-Century Landscape Garden’ in Gardens

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and the Picturesque (Cambridge, ma, 1992), pp. 75–104. 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. 93–4 and 98.

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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 Finlay’s œuvre 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 final 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 Finlay’s 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 l’Air 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.

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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. 178–9, 180–81; 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.

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