Little Sparta is a garden at Dunsyre in the

Pentland Hills The Pentland Hills are a range of hills southwest of Edinburgh, Scotland. The range is around in length, and runs southwest from Edinburgh towards Biggar and the upper Clydesdale. Etymology The name is first recorded for the farm of Pentla ...

in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, created by artist and poet

Ian Hamilton Finlay Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. Life Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, to James Hamilton Finlay and his wife, Annie Pettigrew, both of Scots descent. He was e ...

and his wife Sue Finlay, since 1966. The Arcadian garden includes

concrete poetry Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance. It is sometimes referred to as visual poetry, a term that has now developed a distinct me ...

in sculptural form,

polemic Polemic () is contentious rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and to undermine the opposing position. The practice of such argumentation is called ''polemics'', which are seen in arguments on controversial topic ...

, and philosophical

aphorism An aphorism (from Greek ἀφορισμός: ''aphorismos'', denoting 'delimitation', 'distinction', and 'definition') is a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle. Aphorisms are often handed down by ...

s, together with sculptures and two temples. Altogether it includes over 275 artworks by the artist, created in collaboration with numerous craftsmen and women.

History

The garden was first established in 1966 and was originally named Stonypath. Finlay chose the name "Little Sparta" in 1983, in response to

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian on the southern shore of t ...

's nickname, the "Athens of the North", and playing on the historical rivalry between the Ancient Greek cities

Athens Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...

and

Sparta Sparta ( Doric Greek: Σπάρτα, ''Spártā''; Attic Greek: Σπάρτη, ''Spártē'') was a prominent city-state in Laconia, in ancient Greece. In antiquity, the city-state was known as Lacedaemon (, ), while the name Sparta referre ...

. Little Sparta survived numerous disputes, or "Wars" as Finlay termed them, regarding the rating of the Garden Temple. Finlay lived there until shortly before his death in 2006. The wars are documented in the papers of Graeme Moore, landscape artist who worked with Finlay, held by the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts. Over their 23-year collaboration Ian Hamilton Finlay and Sue Finlay established Little Sparta as an internationally renowned composition, a combination of avant-garden experiment, Scottish wit and whimsy and the English landscape garden tradition. It comprised the front garden, the most intimate space, with many examples of Finlay’s ‘garden poems’; a

woodland garden A woodland garden is a garden or section of a garden that includes large trees and is laid out so as to appear as more or less natural woodland, though it is often actually an artificial creation. Typically it includes plantings of flowering shru ...

extending around a small pool; and a series of paths, areas and sculptures in the wilder hillside landscape. Finlay conceived the garden as composed around inter-connected pools, burns and a small loch, Lochan Eck. Finlay later extended the garden in the 1990s, creating a small English Parkland in the former paddock. A walled garden, ‘

Hortus Conclusus ''Hortus conclusus'' is a Latin term, meaning literally "enclosed garden". At their root, both of the words in ''hortus conclusus'' refer linguistically to enclosure. It describes a genre of garden that was enclosed as a practical concern, a majo ...

’, was added after his death. These areas were created in collaboration with Pia Simig and Ralph Irving.

Concepts

Little Sparta - The present order is the disorder of the future (St Just)

The key concept Ian established at Little Sparta was that of the ‘garden poem', sited within an ‘area’. Finlay defined the relationship between these poem-objects and their surroundings: "Usually each area gets a small artefact, which reigns like a small deity or spirit of place. My understanding is that the work is the whole composition – the artefact in its context. The work is not an isolated object, but an object with flowers, plants, trees, water and so on". Sue Finlay, who undertook the majority of the planting and cultivation, describes the generosity of this creative process in her memoir ''The Planting of a Hillside Garden'': “The learning process. The love involved in this process. That loving absorption – the day-to-day tending of the poems. Their immediate surrounding areas, whether paved, grassy or covered with plants, always needed a lot of individual attention in the summer".

Preservation

The garden is now owned by the Little Sparta Trust, which plans to preserve the garden for the future by raising enough to pay for an ongoing maintenance fund. Trustees have included journalist

Magnus Linklater Magnus Duncan Linklater, CBE (born 21 February 1942) is a Scottish journalist, writer, and former newspaper editor. Early life and education Linklater was born in Orkney, and is the son of Scottish writer Eric Linklater and arts campaigner Marjo ...

and gallery owner

Victoria Miro Victoria Marion Miro (born 1 July 1945) is a British art dealer, "one of the grandes dames of the Young British Artists, Britart scene"Husband, Stuart"Go see... the Victoria Miro gallery" ''The Observer'', 3 December 2000. Retrieved 27 September 2 ...

. The garden is open to the public on a limited basis.

Reception

In December 2004, a poll of fifty Scottish artists, gallery directors and arts professionals, conducted by ''

Scotland on Sunday ''Scotland on Sunday'' is a Scottish Sunday newspaper, published in Edinburgh by JPIMedia and consequently assuming the role of Sunday sister to its daily stablemate '' The Scotsman''. It was originally printed in broadsheet format but in 20 ...

'', voted Little Sparta "the most important work of Scottish art". Art historian Sir Roy Strong has said of Little Sparta that it is "the only really original garden made in this country since 1945". James Campbell, writing in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', describes the garden as "one of the wonders of 20th-century art", and agrees with Hamilton Finlay's description of himself as the "

avant-garde The avant-garde (; In 'advance guard' or ' vanguard', literally 'fore-guard') is a person or work that is experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society.John Picchione, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical ...

ner".

References

External links