ISBN : 9782296136298
SCOTTISH GARDENS AND GARDENERS1
One of the most important works of art in Scotland in the latter part of the twentieth century is Ian Hamilton's Finlay's garden at the place he called "Little Sparta" (otherwise, Stonypath, south west of Edinburgh). The name is significant, for it identifies Finlay's garden as a "double" of an ancient place, or, indeed, as a variety of doubles, since the garden is designed to recall various versions of the classical from ancient Greece to the present. Not, in other words, to recover the classical but rather to dramatise the journey of the classical through the history of European gardening. It also contains a "Monument to the First Battle of Little Sparta", the battle between Finlay and the bureaucracy of Strathclyde Region, which sought to tax him for running a museum which he claimed was a temple, and therefore free from tax, and which becomes, parodically, a "double" of classical conflicts...