Little Sparta is a garden at Dunsyre in the Pentland Hills in South Lanarkshire, Scotland, created by artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and his wife Sue Finlay, since 1966.
The 5-acre (2-hectare) Arcadian garden includes concrete poetry in sculptural form, polemic, and philosophical aphorisms, together with sculptures and two temples. Altogether it includes over 275 artworks by the artist, created in collaboration with numerous craftsmen and women.
The garden was first established in 1966 and was originally named Stonypath. Finlay chose the name "Little Sparta" in 1983, in response to Edinburgh's nickname, the "Athens of the North", and playing on the historical rivalry between the Ancient Greek cities Athens and Sparta. Little Sparta survived numerous disputes, or "Wars" as Finlay termed them, regarding the rating of the Garden Temple. [1] 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. [2]
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 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’, was added after his death. These areas were created in collaboration with Pia Simig and Ralph Irving.
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". [3]
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". [4]
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 and gallery owner Victoria Miro. [5] The garden is open to the public on a limited basis.
In December 2004, a poll of fifty Scottish artists, gallery directors and arts professionals, conducted by Scotland on Sunday , voted Little Sparta "the most important work of Scottish art". [6] Art historian Sir Roy Strong has said of Little Sparta that it is "the only really original garden made in this country since 1945". [7] James Campbell, writing in The Guardian , describes the garden as "one of the wonders of 20th-century art", and agrees with Hamilton Finlay's description of himself as the "avant-gardener". [8]
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 meaning of its own. Concrete poetry relates more to the visual than to the verbal arts although there is a considerable overlap in the kind of product to which it refers. Historically, however, concrete poetry has developed from a long tradition of shaped or patterned poems in which the words are arranged in such a way as to depict their subject.
Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.
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Fulcrum Press was founded in London in the mid-1960s by medical student Stuart Montgomery and his wife Deirdre. Montgomery later became an eminent psychiatrist and expert in depression. Earning a reputation as the premier small press of the late 1960s to early '70s, Fulcrum published major American and British poets in the modernist and the avant-garde traditions in carefully designed books on good paper. The Fulcrum Press made a significant contribution to the British Poetry Revival and was one of the best known little presses of the period, recognized for publishing the works of Modernist poets including Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting, Allen Ginsberg and Roy Fisher.
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Moschatel Press is a small press publisher producing artist's books and poetry collections. It was founded in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, in 1973, by the artist Laurie Clark and the Scottish poet Thomas A. Clark and moved to Pittenweem, Fife in 2002. The Press "is named after adoxa moschatellina, a plant known locally as Town Clock for its four-way green flower heads, with a fifth flower facing the sky." Their main line is in "publishing minimal texts, visual poetry and the like in small neat booklets and postcards."
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Alec Finlay is a Scottish-born artist currently based in Edinburgh. He is a son of Sue Finlay and Ian Hamilton Finlay. Finlay's work takes various forms and media, including poetry, sculpture, collage, audio-visual, neon, and new technologies; often it reflects on human engagement with landscape.
The Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland is a listing of gardens and designed landscapes of national artistic and/or historical significance, in Scotland. The Inventory was originally compiled in 1987, although it is a continually evolving list. From 1991 it was maintained by Historic Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage, and is now updated by a dedicated team within Historic Environment Scotland. As of 2016 the Inventory includes over 300 sites across Scotland.
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Allan Pollok-Morris MSC FRSA is a documentary photographer, bookbinder and publisher.
Margot Sandeman was a Scottish painter, close friend of Joan Eardley and long-time collaborator with poet Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Little Sparta is a British band which was formed in the early 2000s by Alan D. Boyd and named after the garden of the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. Over a number of years the band has changed personnel as their sound has developed. The current line-up is Alan D. Boyd on guitar, Scott Skinner on drums and Susie Honeyman on violin. Their first recordings were released on Fire Records and were collaborations with Scottish poet Gerry Mitchell. Many of these recordings received critical acclaim from the likes of Pitchfork and Drowned in Sound. Later recordings have been released on the Grey Gallery label, started by Susie Honeyman.
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Coordinates: 55°43′25.3″N3°30′32.3″W / 55.723694°N 3.508972°W