Methodology

This essay is an exploration of a series of historical themes as they relate to one built environment. While neoclassicism, the picturesque and garden history are often discussed separately or self-referentially (texts about neoclassicism rarely stray from that circumscribed time period), I examine them here in the context of a contemporary landscape garden. My method is neither arbitrary nor convenient. I choose a modern happening as an arena for the examination of historical ideas because this choice mimics the methodology of the garden concerned as well as my own in writing about it.

Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta (renamed from the previous Stonypath) is an extremely self-conscious verbal and visual trail through history--its monuments, paths and vistas are carefully constructed references to art, culture and society. Finlay uses neoclassicism (in the form of his own contemporary classicizing mode) as the basis for a political critique which denigrates modernism and the ideals of the avant-garde. He utilizes the concept of the picturesque to organize areas of the garden into particular scenes, thus directing the physical and visual experience of a visitor through a series of frames and enclosures. Finlay also works within the tradition of the English landscape garden, popularized in the late eighteenth century. The way in which Finlay integrates Little Sparta into its surrounding environment is evidence of this, as are the types of structures to be found within it. While Finlay may make reference to other histories as well, it is not necessary to attempt a comprehensive survey of his sources (if any or all of his sources can be explicitly stated.) Nor is it necessary to describe all aspects of his garden in detail. What is most interesting about Finlay and his garden is the manner in which he has invoked history, and the consequences that invocation has wrought.

In one kind of reading, Finlay might be labeled and passed off as a pretentious neo-romantic who turns to themes stabilized by history in order to pronounce his personal, contemporary dissatisfactions. Little Sparta is host to so many references that it may appear elitist, alienating or nonsensical to anyone unfamiliar with its allusions. Some authors have indicated that Finlay's creative output is nearly worthless. Brian Sewall suggests that while "the garden is quite neatly done...it much more resembles a demonstration of every trick that can be used by the commercial garden designer to introduce formality where none is needed, than a Fascist political polemic carved in tablets of stone."1 There is a decidedly dadaist edge to some of Finlay's garden sculptures, for they take their cues from his previous work as a "concrete poet" working with dadaist and minimalist plays on words. Sewell concludes that Finlay is only a "shatter-pated poet" and attempts to get the last laugh when he imitates his style by dedicating a poem to him: "Finlay Finale Finally."2 Sewell's tone is glib in comparison to Finlay's professed ideas. Whether or not Finlay is good at what he does (and Little Sparta raises enough questions to suggest he is good at something) is least relevant to this study. I am most interested in using Finlay's work as a springboard for a set of historical and theoretical concerns.

Any passage through Little Sparta is characterized by a series of intersections. Buildings, artifacts, texts, vistas, plants, and shadows conspire to juxtapose the past and the present, creating an ideological framework as suggestive as it is specific. The result is a space of collage, as Prudence Carlson points out, which avoids a spatial or temporal order and which "scrambles language's narrative lockstep...where any (event) possesses an equal 'presentness' with the next."3 This study is arranged thematically to follow in the organizational spirit of Finlay's garden and to undermine a traditionally chronological approach to history. While chronology has represented a reliable structure for the mapping of historical events and ideas, it is hardly a mechanism through which historical "truth" can be discovered. Chronology is itself a constructed diagram which is not seamless. It offers facts that are often unstable, and it ignores the inevitable distance that exists between the student of history and the events under consideration.

In the context of poststructuralism (and other isms that manifest a similar angst about certainty and knowledge) has history been clarified as a constructed narrative; something as framed and isolated as the world that a photograph is misunderstood to entirely represent. I take this distance as a methodological starting point, especially given that I have never actually visited Little Sparta . My ideas about the garden are obviously constructions, and the narrative that results from their combination is strongest when they are accepted and examined as such. Looking back at history through Finlay's garden (just as he looks back at history while making it), I am substituting one kind of filter for another. I do not see history any more than Finlay does, I only offer an interpretation of it.4 The cliché "history repeats itself" is quite relevant. It indicates that while human concerns may change and evolve, there are a set of universal and repeated ideas that continue to assert their importance. It is with this set of ideas in mind that I embark on a project guided by themes rather than dates, for while both are subject to reinterpretation, the former offers the reader interpretive latitude and the latter attempts too much to structure readerly response.

A last methodological note. If any approach to history is understood to be a construction, then by extension history becomes a narrative, or even, a fiction. This is dangerous ground, for I do not propose to suggest that there are no historical facts or that history and fiction are equivalent. I only mean to acknowledge that history is always presented with a bias, and this bias turns it into a fiction of sorts. I am interested in probing the character of this fiction in my exploration of Finlay's garden, for the nature of (and in) a garden sets the stage for an experiential narrative, the order of which is determined by a person walking through it. The sources for this paper are cited because they have something to contribute to it as it progresses, and not because they stand in as signifiers of credibility. The history that I use appears like stepping stones in Little Sparta, it provides a clearer path on which to travel. Any text (written or not) that results from an experience of Finlay's garden is a variable one, and mine acknowledges this eccentricity by engaging it. My hope is that this text operates like a garden in that it takes up what Finlay calls the five types of gardening activity: "namely, sowing, planting, fixing, placing, maintaining...all these may be taken under the one head, composing."5 This text should represent a place; it, too, should be an object of consideration which allows for some kind of experience. Texts that take other people's work as their point of departure run the risk of being parasitical rather than generative, and it is my hope that the premise of my study undermines any such risk.

Origins

At the end of Voltaire's Candide (1759), Candide and Pangloss have a metaphor-laden conversation about gardening. Candide's famous line "we must cultivate our garden" has been liberally quoted, and it comes as no surprise that almost every author who writes about Ian Hamilton Finlay mentions the words of Voltaire's character. Candide's comment is, in part, a reference to the complicated relationship between identity (self), environment (world) and language (knowledge). Throughout history, gardens have been one type of site in which this relationship has been expressed--one could arbitrarily pick any two gardens (say Versailles and that of Alexander Pope), compare their formal characteristics, and understand that gardens are in some way a spatial and pictorial expression of culture, society and politics. Of course, architecture can be read in similar terms, as can many other examples of what might be referred to as "material culture." Nonetheless, the garden is Candide's metaphor of choice because it represents the ultimate originary site. And any gardener must understand that his or her manipulation of the ground, which then results in a transformation of space, which then records a mark or an identity, is an activity which is tied to the story of the Garden of Eden.

The biblical story of the Garden of Eden presents the Garden as a site of both physical and moral transformation. The Garden first appears as a refuge, an arena protected from mortality, work, and self-knowledge. Despite its stable image, the atmosphere of the garden is dependent upon an order of ignorance, in which Adam and Eve refuse the temptation of breaking the single rule that secures the nature of their environment. Essentially, as long as Adam and Eve refuse knowledge, the Garden remains a bountiful grove which demands nothing of them. That it demands nothing characterizes the paradox of its apparent freedom, for in its silent bounty, it does not allow its inhabitants to interact with it. It merely supports them in a tenuous autocracy where denial and refusal guarantee them their safety. The Garden is actually a place of constraint which is under the constant threat of radical change. Once Eve talks with the serpent and ingests the apple, she has made a choice and initiated an interaction that the Garden has denied her. She discovers her body, and the space that it occupies, in a series of actions which deny the possibility that knowledge, body and environment can be separated. After Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, they are forced to acknowledge and come to terms with how what they know shapes who and where they are. They understand that once they are outside of the Garden of Eden, they must cultivate their own garden--in otherwords, they are responsible for shaping their own world. Pangloss's response to Candide is thus equally important to the business of gardening: "You are right...for when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put thereut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born for rest."6

Ian Hamilton Finlay's undertaking at Little Sparta is consciously related to the original garden story; his is certainly an investigation of the relationship between knowledge, work and environment. Whether he goes directly to the Garden of Eden for his source material or to those gardeners of history who have worked from and within that narrative, Finlay works with the awareness that his earthly manipulations resonate on a much larger scale. "With the garden," he writes, "one makes this astonishing discovery that you can actually change a bit of the actual world by taking out a spade of earth."7 Despite all of the possible effects of a garden in its totality (its ability to teach, to generate aesthetic pleasure, to expose or direct nature), the first and basic act of gardening is a wilful demonstration of power and even, of magic. Moving dirt is equivalent to shaping the world, and no matter how small the world of the garden being created, it is a part of a series of spaces which explode exponentially (dirt/spot/path/area/garden/ hill/village/county/country/continent/planet) and upon which it must be seen as a reflection.

A glance at a late sixteenth century garden by Bernard Palissy will clarify that history is full of gardens which depend on these sorts of understandings for their resultant character. Palissy's garden consists of a geometrical plan which takes its cues from the topography upon which it iss imposed. He divides the space into four equal parts which are separated by avenues. At the four corners of the crossing he places amphitheatres, and at the ends of the avenues as well as the corners of the perimeter he puts eight "cabinets" with fountains, mechanical inventions and teaching phrases.8 This brief description indicates an interpretive structure. First, Palissy imposes a geometrical order on a natural environment. Second, he civilizes the space with elements like avenues, which direct movement and structure the garden so that it can act as a world in itself. Third, he provides amphitheatres which underscore the garden's existence as a spectacle and event. And last, Palissy makes containers for knowledge in the form of his cabinets, which contain not only objects but words for the edification (moral and imaginative) of the visitor. Phrases like "Without wisdom it is impossible to please God" and "Wisdom is our guide to the eternal Kingdom" indicate the kinds of lessons that Palissy intended to impart. Palissy's landscape intervention reveals much about seventeenth century concerns, which in turn speak to the possibilities for expression in a landscape. As Alberto Pérez-Gómez points out,

During the seventeenth century, art, gardening, and architecture--disciplines responsible for the configuration of man's world--were necessarily concerned with the fundamental problem of philosophy; the reconciliation between subject and object...The transformation of cities, gardens, and internal spaces implicitly demonstrated the belief in the transcendent nature of (a) new geometrical knowledge...Baroque perspective...was a symbolic configuration...9

Palissy's garden is a symbolic space which actively engages a visitor to interact with and consider it. The garden is an arena of reflection, in which the perceiver and the perceived are separated by a distance that must be acknowledged and characterized. Palissy's garden, and gardens like his, provides a safe haven in which to practice and imagine the character of one's interaction with the world outside.

Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta is structured, not surprisingly, in ways that mimic some of Palissy's ideas. I do not mean to say that their gardens look similar, for they do not. Nor do I mean to suggest that they manifest the same set of concerns: Finlay's garden speaks to issues of the twentieth century, and these are necessarily different from the sources of information and inspiration that might have been available to a sixteenth century gardener. Despite these obvious differences, Finlay, too, is interested in imposing a structure upon an environment. He guides his visitors through his garden by designating paths and clearings. His garden is theatrical in part because it is a strange undertaking (few poets or artists these days use gardens as their sites for artistic expression)10 but also because it is is indecipherable to those who do not understand its allusions. It is a garden that confronts as much as it may mystify, and given either response, it must be understood as a place which means to call into question the given relationship between subject and object even as it teaches various means of thinking about that relationship.

Gardening

Forays into garden history will reveal that nature and man's relationship to it are of tantamount importance to those manipulating the ground. What nature dictates or what it receives has, throughout history, been the basis for creating or understanding systems of (symbolic) order. These systems have been linguistic even as they may have appeared in pictorial or sculptural terms. One need only turn to a few examples from the eighteenth century to clarify how investigations into the origins of form (in art, architecture and the like) turn to nature for their answers.

In Emile ou de l'education , written in 1762, Jean-Jacques Rousseau adapts the story of Robinson Crusoe so that it serves his ideas about a "state of nature" by providing a manual for a single man alone in the wild. Anthony Vidler recounts,

we might imagine Emile recreating Cursoe's fearful exploration of his territory, his first experiments in baking bread, his manufacture of primitive tools, and, finally, the building of his dwelling.11

In Rousseau's adaptation, the story is altered to focus on Crusoe's interaction with and intervention in his environment--actions which quite literally create his world. Rousseau's imaginary student is taught the steps to his own civilized wilderness in the form of exploring, experimenting, manufacturing, and finally building.
Another eighteenth century writer who works less metaphorically and more scientifically than Rousseau is a missionary named Joseph-Francois Lafitau. Lafitau writes a cultural history of shelter in 1724 which includes a history of the "origins and progress of idolatry." This is a particularly interesting part of his treatise, for he links language, building and society in his effort to describe the origins of built form. According to Anthony Vidler, Lafitau
traced the emergence of symbolic forms, from the simple designation of a mountain or sacred wood, the erection of a standing stone or altar, the shaping of stones into cones, pyramids, and cylinders as memorials, to the sculpting of images and simulacra.12

Here, designation, erection, shaping and sculpting are the means by which order is imposed upon or discovered within a landscape, and it is through these means that a symbolic and physical order can arise there.

I mention Rousseau and Lafitau, two unrelated writers in many senses, in order to glean from their writings some of the mechanisms that have been understood to structure landscape (and eventually society.) Where Rousseau emphasizes exploration, experimentation, manufacturing and building, and Lafitau discusses designation, erection, shaping and sculpting, we can find a strange similarity to their ideas in Ian Hamilton Finlay's description of the five types of gardening activity, namely sowing, planting, fixing, placing and maintaining. It can be recalled that Finlay organizes all of them under the rubric of composition , which is really another word for ordering. And if one turns to another text by Michel Foucault, a more theoretical account of the character of order entitled The Order of Things , it will become increasingly clear that order can be best understood in the terms that Finlay sets forth because they are in some sense universal. Foucault's text is broken up into categories such as representing, speaking and classifying, which themselves are made up of ideas about articulation, designation, derivation and structure. It is this kind of historical and theoretical framework that I apply to Finlay's Little Sparta in an attempt to reveal its particular character.

Sowing

One of the main structures in Little Sparta is a temple. The building is a converted stone agricultural edifice and upon its facade is inscribed "To Apollo, His Music, His Missiles, His Muses."13 This building, which first served as a gallery for Finlay's sculpture and poetry, describes most prominently the referential character of Finlay's garden, and insinuates how he uses history to make a contemporary critique. The garden temple originates as a form in eighteenth century England, and Finlay creates his in its historical image. As a form in history, the temple has been understood to complement the character of the garden in which it is placed, for as Vidler notes

the jardin-anglais (is) the allegorical representation of the landscape of the Elysian fields...the increasingly popular forms of the English landscape garden were adopted as the environmental agents of the initiatory state of mind...the temple built in the garden was an individual asylum, a retreat of the privileged.14

Whereas the garden sets up an environment, the temple is a space within it that provides an arena for reflection. Finlay places his temple and garden within this typology, for both serve as spaces removed from culture but from which culture can be examined and critiqued.

Finlay's current day temple first served as a gallery in which his work (in the form of prints, incriptions, tiles etc.) could be sold. That Finlay now calls it a temple does not change its form (his work is still inside), but rather the appearance of Finlay's intent. Apparently the garden
now has a temple, rather than a gallery, because of Finlay's increasing realization that his work has a spiritual significance which transcends the commercial element. Classicism has come to seem for him the most decisive possible way of repudiating the values of a secular society, which has hardly yet realised the effects of its eudaimonistic assumptions upon the realm of art.15

Whatever the shape of this "spiritual significance," the temple is a conscious retreat for both Finlay and his art from art establishment protocol. By renaming it, Finlay may believe that the art inside of it is separated from the art world values that he finds despicable, but more important than whether or not the building lives up to this symbolic role is the fact that it is meant to be symbolic. He has insisted upon its symbolic role for the world outside of Little Sparta , in fact. Paradoxically, Finlay's choice to rename the building coincides with his decision to propose its exemption from taxation because it is, in his mind, a site which represents the classical tradition and refers to the nature of culture. Not surprisingly, Finlay's decision to declare the building tax-exempt has created a rift between him and the region in which Little Sparta is located. He refuses to pay taxes even under constant threat from his region's directors. When asked about the situation, Finlay is so passionate that his responses are almost unintelligible. Besides calling it "obviously ridiculous," he points out
what they're saying from their populist, leftist, fashionable, materialist, essentially Stalinist viewpoint, is that the Western tradition doesn't exist and is not allowed to be a content of British law. Which is quite a dramatic kind of position to take up, and people ought to pay a wee bit of attention to that. If the culture had risen to the occasion, it's really a glorious kind of dispute.16

If Finlay sounds like a revolutionary, it is quite clear that he would like to be seen as one. He thinks of himself as a "minor revolutionary," and if he considers himself an educator, he clarifies that he carries arms because he "couldn't really be an unarmed educator in Scotland. It's asking for trouble."17 Finlay's temple is both a retreat and an attack then, and Finlay illustrates its dual role and that of the garden as a whole when he says "certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks."18 Finlay actually uses figures from the French Revolution as models for his own inscriptions by revolutionaries like Jean-Baptiste Louvet ("All the noble sentiments of my heart, all its most praiseworthy impulses--I could give them free reain, in the midst of this solitary wood") can be found at many points in the garden.
I quote Finlay at length not because his comments are particularly believable (they seem to be quite self-conscious and typical avant-garde strategies) but because they present Little Sparta as a garden in which the activity of sowing depends upon ideas and history as well as on actual seeds. Finlay's temple is the central image which supports the sowing which he does in the garden, and in this sense it can be read as the linguistic core from which the rest of the garden may be understood. To speak of a building type in the eighteenth century is to imply "its search for original validation...but also its specific aspect, the form that enable(s) it to be read as to its purpose at first glance."19 Finlay introduces his temple into a society which can no longer easily read its signs, but must learn them, and this is its value. The ideas behind typology are encyclopedic--they record the meanings and presence of things in the world. Finlay capitalizes on the history of the garden temple type, and understands that the expression of a type is historically an expression
of language; in the same way as the first words were expressed in signs (hieroglyphs) that were seen to present the image of physical objects, a language which...'speaks to the eyes,' so the first forms of buildings...presented a universe of known messages.20

Essentially, Finlay sees himself creating a new artistic language in Little Sparta, one that will subvert the received one which is, to him, based on capitalism and divorced from both spirituality and tradition. Regardless of whether the garden can overturn such standards, it remains a contemporary site that attempts to repropose an historical system of communication between language and a landscape.

Planting

Finlay has said that "Installing is the hard toil of garden making, placing is its pleasure."21 The work of installation at Little Sparta has been done in cycles, depending on available finances, time and energy. As with any garden, compositional choices in the landscape are part of an evolutionary process. While a painter can place a daub of paint and be quite sure of its character, a gardener must not only put his plants and his signatures in the ground but must also wait for their character to develop. Plants may die, they may develop unpredictably, they may kill other elements of the landscape. It is the gardener's task to choose and watch, and to alter a series of primary conceptions as the landscape transforms them at will. A gardener is dependent upon his relationship with the land that he works, and depending on his intent, he will attempt to dominate and respond to it in kind.

Planting at Litttle Sparta is equivalent to the idea of "designation" as it is expressed by both Lafitau and Foucault. Planting is a precursor to "placing" or "fixing"; it sets the stage for their more specific languages. As Foucault notes,
If, fundamentally, the function of language is to name, that is, to raise up a representation or point it out, as though with a finger, then it is indication and not judgment. It is linked to things by a mark, a notation, an associated figure, a gesture of designation: nothing that could be reduced to a relation of predication. The principle of primal nomination, of the origin of words, is balanced by the formal primacy of judgement. As though, on either side of language, unfolded in all its articulations, there lay its being, in its verbal role as attribution, and its origin, in its role as primary designation.22
Before tending to specific imagery, Finlay must characterize the ground on which it will rest. He has to decide upon the shape and size of his canvas, and then prime it, before applying other descriptive elements. The enclosures and expanses, the ponds and the paths that delineate Finlay's primary scheme will then become the sites for indications and markers which constantly refer back to it.

A description of Finlay's preoccupations with the layout of the land clarifies how he regards its compositional possibilities. Scale and direction are of great importance. In a letter of 1967, Finlay says "I have been speculating...on the idea of the garden as an enclosed thing. For a while...I was greatly perplexed as to why Stonypath did not have a garden-y garden; and I eventually realised that it was the lack of enclosing verticals."23 Finlay divides the landscape into areas by framing and extending the topography even while he adds to it. Areas of dense planting, some with fruits and vegetables, alternate with native moorland. Three ponds contribute to the reflective character of the garden even while they represent a material change from the plantings that they, in part, support. Other, more formal spaces include a "Homage Area" or "Roman Garden" (a paved area inside a stand of conifers), a "Homage to the Villa d'Este," and a sunken garden. Changes of level and view, of proximity and color, make a landscape that describes sensations as much as it does ideas.

Fixing

Those elements of the landscape (inclusive of ground, plant/tree and sky) which are considered given in a place can also be "fixed" or "articulated". In Little Sparta, shadows, reflections, clouds and specific areas are called into focus as representations: their new identity then transforms their natural discourse. Finlay interferes with the idea that these elements are easily recognizable. They are actually "representation(s) providing the articulation for another, with a possibility of displacement that constitutes at the same time the freedom of discourse and the differences between languages."24 When Finlay substitutes the word tree for an actual tree, he enacts a transformation which reveals the difference between the language of man and that of nature, between the language of the gardener and that of the viewer. Finlay's ways of seeing and describing places in Little Sparta opens them to a heightened and more plural discourse.

Finlay frames the sky in his "Cloud Board," which takes the form of a wooden board inscribed with the word "cloud" and a bisected tub set in the ground and surrounded by stone chippings. On certain days, the word "cloud" is reflected in the tub at the same time as a passing cloud in the sky records its image there. This relationship between the signifier (the word "cloud") and the signified (the actual cloud, which is, ironically, always a representation) is extended metaphorically "by the planting of aquatic plants in the tub, water-lilies to simulate the billowing cloud in summer and...small green clusters of the starwort leaves in winter."25 Here, Finlay exposes the tenuous relationship between image and meaning by clarifying how his interpretations of and names for certain forms can essentially come to be understood as constituting them.

Shadows are also an element of the garden that Finlay chooses to exploit. A series of inscribed wooden posts mark various points in the garden, and they are all accompanied by shadows made of brick which are placed in the ground beside them. It has been suggested that Finlay's use of the motif of the false shadow is "a reminder perhaps of the paucity of real shadows in a climate where uninterrupted sunshine is relatively rare."26 A more likely explanation is that Finlay enjoys extending the relationship between the real and unreal, the seen and the imagined. One potted evergreen in the garden has a round shadow embedded in the gravel where it sits, and "occasionally, a real shadow is thrown by the evergreen, duplicating and overlapping its make-believe precursor."27 This kind of occasion would seem the point of such manipulations, and a moment that Finlay would cherish.

At certain points in the garden, Finlay manipulates the scenic character of the landscape by literally turning it into a series of pictures. Finlay borrows heavily from the history of the picturesque and three dimensionally recreates images by Albrecht Durer and Claude Lorrain in the actual landscape. Durer's watercolor Das Grosse Räsenstuck is recreated through a series of specific plantings (including reeds and irises) and "signed" with a stone block which is incscribed with Durer's famous monogram. "An interesting effect is obtained by this 'signature'...it is as if Dürer's vision were inscribed on the world itself..."28 A similar endeavor is undertaken in another part of the garden where a bridge is inscribed with the Latin "Claudi." From the fixed vantagepoint of the bridge it is possible to look upon a landscape which has been transformed to represent a landscape outside of itself, even while it reveals something of its own character. Finlay acknowledges two masters who have recreated landscapes themselves by making two metalandscapes--representations of representations of landscapes.

Placing

The objects which Finlay (finally) places within the increasingly specific scheme of Little Sparta constitute the most obvious evidence of his interventions. They represent the site of his speech, but they also signal the problem of language's inability to speak clearly. Speaking, and the text that spoken language produces, exists in the realm of representations as well. As Foucault notes, "for the enigma of a speech which a second language must interpret is substituted the essential discursivity of representation: the open possibility, as yet neutral and undifferentiating, but which it will be the task of discourse to fulfil and to determine."29 Finlay attempts to distance any interpretation of his linguistic play from that which provokes it; his references to historical statements and events physically collapse the space between then and now in order to call into question the kind of reading their presence suggests.

It should be noted here that Finlay's activity previous to his work at Stonypath was largely devoted to writing. He was affiliated with a group of "concrete poets" whose work was well known in Britain between 1964 and 1967. These poets took a dadaistic approach to their work and explored the results of chance juxtapositions of unrelated materials, as well as the relationship of words to their context. Many of the poems which resulted were a westernized version of the haiku, where only a few words would be used to evoke an image. Finlay extends these ideas in the landscape of Little Sparta by placing objects and words in such a way that they (and their messages) appear unexpected and even cryptic. As Yves Abrioux points out, they "put the reader/observer in a position where he must always be ready to perform diverse figurative, generic and semantic operations."30 If particular phrases or objects seem entirely indecipherable, then they have successfully become sublime elements in the landscape which invite discomfort and meditation.

Consider one flat stone close by the shore of a pond which bears the inscription "See Poussin, Hear Lorrain." For a visitor educated in the history of art, the stone might suggest that s/he look at the way in which the landscape is organized while culling some sensation, or some sense of atmosphere from it. Nicholas Poussin was, after all, a neoclassical master whose still, classicized compositions offered a dramatic contrast to a multitude of active and theatrical Baroque paintings of his time. And Claude Lorrain was known for his mythical and highly atmospheric landscapes, paintings which demanded some sensation from their viewer. Yet the inscription can just as easily be reversed, for Poussin's paintings have an atmosphere of their own while Lorrain's are well known for the framing mechanisms the artist employed. If this inversion is encouraged, the stone's inscription does not privilege the learned visitor for its operative words are really "see" and "hear." To someone who has never heard the names Poussin or Lorrain (and really for someone who has), these are the only words which matter, and they suggest a multiplicity of responses.

Maintaining

Many sculptures in Little Sparta refer to military forms--battleships, guns and revolutionary mottoes predominate. Finlay's personal war is a challenge to the avant-garde, and the symbolism in the garden supports his pursuit. Yet the garden itself lends much to this war, for it is always under the threat of destruction from inattention. Like many contemporary art forms which deny history permanent objects (performances, happenings), Finlay's garden is a composition that needs constant care in order to retain its character. Finlay is aware that gardens, as he puts it, "autodestruct." When asked if he has planned for its autodestruction, he replies:

It won't become a nice ruin, because it's just not organized enough in such a way as to be an effective ruin. What I would like is to have a number of painters and photographers paint it and photograph it before its demise. I mean, it's obviously theoretically possible that Scotland would look after it. It's quite a well-known garden. But with what one knows of Scotland, they won't look after it...31

Just as Finlay would have his garden provoke an infinite number of readings in its current state, he suggests that it can be historicized by those who come to record their readings of it.
Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta is one of the rare contemporary sites where the relationship between language, identity and landscape can be examined. All too often the theoretical and historical underpinnings of society are divorced from its physical forms because, somehow, they are misunderstood as unrelated. Finlay has no such misconceptions but revels in the power of history to provide both lessons and questions. Little Sparta is a didactic site even as it is an indeterminate one.

NOTES

1 Brian Sewell, "Ian Hamilton Finlay: Sculptor or Poet?," Apollo 129 (February 1989), 116.
2 Ibid., 117.
3 Prudence Carlson, "The Garden on the Hill," Arts Magazine (February 1990), 44.
4 My attitude here should not be understood as a move to applaud the subjective or the relativistic. All historical opinions have some element of subjectivity, and the best opinions are those that are most learned and self-conscious about their own position. There is a framework of research on which I stand to pronounce what I acknowledge are, in the end, my opinions.
5 Ian Hamilton Finlay, "More Detached Sentences on Gardening in the Manner of Shenstone," collected in Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, A Visual Primer (Edinburgh: Reaktion Books, 1985), 40.
6 Voltaire, Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Signet Books, 1961), 101.
7 Everett Potter, "A Forgotten Art: A Conversation with Ian Hamilton Finlay at Stonypath, Scotland," Arts 62 (September 1987), 82.
8 Paraphrased from Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 170.
9 Ibid., 174.
10 I do not mean to suggest that environments are not being built anywhere today which attempt to edify in some way. In "high art" circles, like those in which Finlay travels, gardening is not generally understood or discussed as a means of expression. I know of a number of gardens, like Howard Finster's "Paradise Garden" in Georgia, which are meant to be educational. Finster's garden is devoted to biblical lessons--the scriptures litter his yard even as they are painted on his car. But Finster is known mostly as an "outsider artist", so his garden is not discussed in theoretical terms but rather because it is so unusual and so strange. A scholar who might apply 17th century ideas about gardening to Finster's garden would probably be ridiculed because Finster, previously a used car salesman, could not have known anything of such a precedent. Nonetheless, there are some universal gardening activities which could be common to all, so such comparisons are not necessarily useless.
11 Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987), 15.
12 Ibid., 11.
13 According to Stephen Bann, the inscription is a play on words that "recalls the dual attributes of the Greek god who, as the philosopher Edward Hussey wrote in a letter to Finlay in 1977, 'as "far-shooting" archer sends out messages of death, as lyre-player messages of music.'" See Stephen Bann, "A Description of Stonypath," Journal of Garden History 1, no. 2 (April-June 1981), 134.
14 Vidler, The Writing of the Walls , 99.
15 Bann, "A Description of Stonypath," 134.
16 Potter, "A Forgotten Art...", 83.
17 Ibid.
18 Ian Hamilton Finlay, "Unconnected Sentences on Gardening," collected in Yves Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, A Visual Primer (Edinburgh: Reaktion Books, 1985), 40.
19 Anthony Vidler, "The Idea of Type: The Transformation of the Academic Ideal, 1750-1830," Oppositions 8 (Spring, 1977), 99.
20 Ibid., 101-102.
21 Finlay, "Unconnected Sentences on Gardening," collected in Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, A Visual Primer , 40.
22 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 104.
23 Bann, "A Description of Stonypath," 118.
24 Foucault, The Order of Things , 99.
25 Bann, "A Description of Stonypath," 117.
26 Ibid., 128.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., 132.
29 Foucault, The Order of Things , 79.
30 Abrioux, Ian Hamilton Finlay, A Visual Primer , 189.
31 Bann, "A Description of Stonypath," 80.