A Garden of Earthly Delights

John Roberts sends us an account of the Arran Civic Trust visit to Little Sparta on Wednesday 13th June.

Little Sparta is a garden full of works of art created in the late ‘sixties and onward by the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006) and his wife. It lies in the south west of the Pentland Hills near the village of Dunsyre. The site is not easy to find, being at the end of about half a mile of rough farm track, but once located, a visit repays the effort a hundredfold.

Sparta was the traditional enemy of Athens, so the name Little Sparta was deliberately chosen in ironic contrast to the nickname of nearby Edinburgh, the “Athens of the North.” The garden does indeed contain references to ancient Greece and Rome in its sculptures and monuments, but Finlay’s imagination roams far wider. The visitor can pick up references to the French Revolution, the sea, and the Second World War, as well as inscriptions with wise aphorisms, proverbs, puns, pure flights of stream-of-consciousness word association and similar verbal fancies. Some of the imagery is undoubtedly violent – for example the pair of stone hand-grenades topping brick gateposts – but paradoxically the whole gives a feeling of wonderful peace, relaxation and freedom. One could lose oneself for hours there.

But Little Sparta is not just a collection of works of art. It is a garden – or rather, a set of individual but interconnected gardens. There is a Woodland Garden, a Roman Garden, an Allotment, English Parkland, and so on. Effective use is made of water in the Temple Pool Garden and with the completely natural-looking Lochan Eck. And there are special features, such as little temples, the Hortus Conclusus (Enclosed Garden) set in a roofless former farm building, and a curving path neatly edged with cunningly trimmed longer grass in the English Parkland. The maintenance of all this must be constant hard work, but it is beautifully done, and the staff are to be congratulated on their efforts.

Since 1994, and especially since Ian Hamilton Finlay’s death, responsibility for the upkeep of the garden rests with the Little Sparta Trust. Needless to say, this needs the support of the public, through charitable donations but also through admission charges and sales. If you are thinking of going to see it, first check the details on www.littlesparta.co.uk.

In the words of the art expert Sir Roy Strong: “The garden is one of the few made post-1945 which must not be lost. It remains to me still the only really original garden made in this country since that date”.