A Green Thought

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The New York Sun

Gardens may have their messages but they aren’t usually spelled out in words. But an hour’s drive from Edinburgh, in the Pentland Hills, the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay has been laboring for over 40 years to create a garden in which words play as big a role as shrubbery. Mr. Finlay, who just turned 80, is a stone carver as well as a poet. He handles his words as though they were formed of some igneous or metamorphic matter; and yet, he is rarely ponderous in his chiseled pronouncements.


His garden is named Little Sparta, and it is appropriately laced with inscriptions, Latin phrases, statuesque numerals, and celebratory columns, all redolent of antiquity. It is the abrupt juxtaposition of these verbal apparitions with the dense greenery of the 4 acres that makes this seem an enchanted spot. The inscriptions range from ancient poets to the firebrands of the French Revolution – his particular favorite is St. Just – to the 19th-century German visionary Holderlin as well as to Mr. Finlay himself.


Little Sparta has only recently opened to the public. After an hour’s bus ride you must trudge up a muddy path, dodging puddles and cowpats. In neighboring pastures flocks of sheep bleat lugubriously while crows circle cawing overhead. It is all bleak and melancholy, though the surrounding hills are softly molded and show violet bands of heather when the sun manages to break through the clouds. A stout gate of wooden rails marks the entranceway. Once inside, sheltered from the dripping rain, you find yourself in a succession of little groves threaded by symmetrically patterned paths of cut stone.


There is a hushed feeling about Little Sparta, but the gardens – really, a string of gardens casually connected – are welcoming rather than intimidating. At moments you can understand why the ancients – Celts as well as Romans – felt that certain secluded stands of trees harbored hidden divinities. This hovering reverence is quickly corrected, however, by the inscriptions which are terse and strangely playful. Over one gate is inscribed “A Cottage A Field A Plough,” the homely words given startling monumentality by the grandeur of the lettering. The phrase, it turns out, comes from St. Just’s definition of human happiness and what it requires; unexpected sentiments from so bloodthirsty a revolutionary.


These inscriptions, some hewn out of granite, others delicately gilded and lettered on half-hidden plaques, peep out of the vegetation at the turn of a path or on the edge of a pond. It isn’t at all clear what they signify at first glance, but that’s part of their charm. Mr. Finlay has long been known as a leading “concrete poet.” I’ve never found this school of poetry very appealing – words can never be purely visual objects, I think – but here, perhaps because the subtle architecture of the gardens enhances them, the incised words do take on a sculptural force.


Despite his concrete allegiances, Mr. Finlay’s own poetry is quite playful, as shown in “Finlay’s House” (which gives some sense of the incipient chaos that supplies much of Little Sparta’s anarchic charm):



And this is Finlay’s house –
A wild stone on the floor,
Lots and lots of books
And a chair where you can’t sit for – no, not the tar –
The hooks, the lost fish-hooks.
Dried fish festoon the wall
And that stone sticks the door.
Spiders spin in nooks. The visitors tend to fall.
They trip first, then they fall –
They catch on the lost fish-hooks.
I ought to shift that stone
But it seems easier
To unscrew the door.
Am I an awful man?
I’m better housed than ducks
And like to lose fish-hooks.


The poet’s whimsy marks every stone and glade. Little Sparta, which he recently put through a “Five-Year Hellenization Plan,” whatever that may mean, flourishes under the aegis of the god Apollo. A golden head of the god, blazing out of the underbrush, meets you, with something of a shock, on one of the more hidden paths. Apollo is not only the deity who confers order and balance but also the god in “The Iliad” who “makes the corpsefires burn.” As you wander the hillsides or pause by the lake where five black swans dabble their red beaks in the muddy shallows, you realize that Little Sparta is also an elegiac garden. The names and mementoes of the fallen, especially the dead of the World War II, glint discreetly from broken columns or stand on slabs. The lightness of touch throughout the landscape intensifies this note of sorrow.


Mr. Finlay’s work is well documented; one of the best books on the garden is Jessie Sheeler’s “Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay” (Francis Lincoln Ltd., 143 pages, $45), with spectacular color photographs by Andrew Lawson. Inevitably the book idealizes the place; everything stands in a permanently golden light. In his poem “The Garden,” Andrew Marvell wrote of experiencing “a green thought in a green shade.” Despite the muddy cattle track and the bleating sheep, that’s the color of thought I took home from Little Sparta.


The New York Sun

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