Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay

Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay

John Dixon-Hunt

Language: English

Pages: 200

ISBN: 1861893930

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Though Ian Hamilton Finlay’s (1925–2006) famous work, Little Sparta, was voted the most important work of Scottish art, his influence—and works—is found worldwide. Nature Over Again reveals the story behind Finlay’s renowned horticultural works, presenting the first study that examines all of his garden designs and “interventions.”
An accomplished Scottish poet, writer, artist, and gardener, Finlay infused his garden designs with his distinct aesthetic philosophy and poetic sensibility. John Dixon Hunt situates his analysis of Finlay’s gardens in the context of that broader philosophy and poetic work, drawing on Finlay’s writings about the art and practice of garden design. From the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart to the University of California at San Diego campus, the book documents how Finlay built an oeuvre of international renown—ultimately arguing that Finlay’s innovations are best understood in the context of the long tradition of European gardens.
 
Copiously illustrated, Nature Over Again brings the work of this distinguished modernist to vivid life.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

contrivances (stiles) for crossing stone walls or fences.16 Another item also draws upon local cultural knowledge, for only familiarity with both English country lanes and the notion that they always meander (‘the rolling English drunken made the rolling English road’ of G. K. Chesterton’s poem) will make immediate sense of an element in the most recent part of Little Sparta, the English Parkland, where in an absolutely straight lane between hedges a bench tells us that ‘A lane need not meander’

second without the lightning flashes but with a German inscription, ‘Auch ich war in Arkadien’. The elaborate verbal texts gloss this reduction of the elegiac in favour of the moralistic and explain the various allusions that the new mottoes and the reconfigurations – by Poussin of Guercino, by Hincks of the various painters – introduce. Such 96 et in arcadia ego expanded commentary, with references to other texts and images, becomes a favourite means by which Finlay can collapse the distance

Pertaining to Ideal Landscape; some have since been placed in other gardens.14 Among the words redefined on separate pages was ‘grove’, which two years earlier had already been offered by itself, alongside a drawing by Gary Hincks after the eighteenth-century antiquarian, William Stukeley, and there inscribed with his phrase ‘The antient manner of Temples in Groves’; it is now repeated among the Seven Definitions as ‘grove, n. an irregular peristyle’, but without Stukeley’s illustration of the

409. 12 For a recent analysis of Petrarch’s gardens, see Raffaella Fabiano Giannetto, Medici Gardens: From Making to Design, Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture (Philadelphia, pa, 2008), pp. 99–115. 13 ‘Fleur de l’Air’, notes to plates 60 and 61. It may also be true that via his abstractions Finlay gives us a better grasp of Petrarch at Vaucluse than a visit nowadays to the actual site permits! 14 See section Five, note 8. 15 Finlay has proposed an enlarged bronze version of one of the

of Finlay’s own projected vision. Other printed or book proposals reveal the same desire to orchestrate a set of cultural associations by which a response to the designed site may be enlarged. In 1994 the Wild Hawthorn Press produced a small booklet in the manner of Humphry Repton for the revision of part of Little Sparta: a flap showing the current obelisk on the edge of the Lochan was lifted to reveal a computer model of a proposed Temple of Apollo. Texts on the following page explain in detail

Download sample

Download