Photo-Op: Graven Man

To call Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) a poet and a garden designer is to imply that he practiced in two disciplines. He didn’t. Like Joseph Cornell or Donald Evans, he was an artist whose genius required a new medium, one forged from his ideas about landscape and his reverence for the word. Walking around his garden at Little Sparta in Scotland’s Pentland Hills, you encounter endlessly inventive bits of sculpture and words: planters made out of herms of the philosophers Zeno and Epicurus, painted metal silhouettes of Apollo and Daphne hidden in a copse, a quote from Saint-Just carved on scattered stones, and the Hegelian Stile (a fence that reads ‘thesis,’ a gate that reads ‘antithesis’ and a stile inscribed ‘synthesis’). But Finlay’s works are never center-stage; they are part of a cohesive landscape and steal up on the stroller. (Finlay was disturbed when photographers acted as though Little Sparta was little more than a sculpture garden.) Little Sparta is the place most indelibly associated with Finlay—his own private Eden—but he also designed a major garden in southern France: Fleur de l’Air. One of dozens of sites documented in Louisa Jones’s ‘Mediterranean Garden Design’ (Thames Hudson, 224 pages, $60), Finlay’s Provençal fantasy is a testament to the universality of his art, as much at home among olive and lavender terraces as the flinty hills of Scotland. Finlay treated Fleur de l’Air’s terracing like successive waves of narrative, allowing endless itineraries for the owners’ strolls. On one narrow terrace, he deployed a quote from Michelet’s history of the French Revolution: ‘They write the law on paper and parchment; us, we wanted to cut ours into the stone of eternal right, onto the rock that bears the world’s unchanging justice and indestructible fairness.’ Ruin-like (and rune-like), the stones are the perfect epitaph for one of art’s rare originals.

The Editors

A version of this article appeared June 9, 2012, on page C8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Photo-Op: Graven Man.