Text 13. A garden as space for political experience

 

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The story of a little park that now counts as one of the classic examples of modern garden design began 33 years ago in the bleak moorland near the Pentland Hills in the Scottish Lowlands. This Gesamtkunstwerk was not created by either a brilliant garden artist or a landscape architect. The poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, born in 1925 and already internationally known as an exponent of concrete poetry more than 40 years ago,moved into the abandoned and derelict farmhouse at Stonypath with his wife and child in 1966. He was almost penniless and completely inexperienced in garden design, but inspired by a vision. He transformed the wild estate, which covers over one and a half hectares, into a poet’s garden, using the most primitive of means.

Finlay’s love of concrete poetry demanded more than a vegetable garden to provide for his young family. He started by placing artefacts in the garden. Anyone visiting Little Sparta today follows a bumpy path through the sheep fields and has to deal with three gates to arrive in a paradisal garden realm with a finely-tuned composition of trees, bushes, perennials and artworks.

Taking the early English landscape gardens created by poets, philosophers and politicians in the 18th century as a precise model, the selection and placing of the sculptures is not left to chance in Finlay’s Little Sparta, but works to a philosophical programme that resists the total secularization of our culture. Exploring the intricately designed sections with resounding names like Roman Garden, Epicurean Garden or Julie’s Garden is like a journey through the sagas of classical antiquity, enriched with relics from the whole of European cultural history. In the grove of trees you come across pyramids and fragments of columns, stones are engraved with sayings, busts of Epicurus and Hypnos create sacred spots and the formally mundane equipment shed has been transformed into a garden temple of Apollo.

As Finlay struggles with the superficiality of today’s time, his garden has taken on neoclassical traits. His return to classical traditions and values is based on his conviction that man must take full responsibility for his actions at all times in the interests of further cultural development, and must not give up his will and bow to current trends towards political, ecological and social correctness. Finlay will take anything on if this conviction has to be defended. When his garden temple was threatened with taxation as a commercial building in 1983, he started a sensational struggle with the fiscal authorities. The “Monument to the First Battle of Little Sparta” is evidence of his unshakeable will to stand up to secular powers.

 

TEXT 14. SYMBOLIC READINGS

 

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Danish and Swedish garden architects like Gundmund Nyeland Brandt and Carl Theodor Sшrensen were always a little reserved about fashionable innovations from nearby foreign countries. In the first half of the 20th century they developed a simple yet powerful and elegant formal language for gardens and landscape that – rather like Danish design – is considered timelessly modern. Nature played an important part in the great northern garden architects’ creations. It had been necessary from time immemorial to use freely growing or severely trimmed hedges and groups of trees as protection against the strong Atlantic winds that swept over the gently rolling terrain of Jutland and the Danish islands. The familiar streamlined figures emerged, as if the wind had completely worn down the corners and edges in the Danes’ garden plans, which they like to make geometrical. Where the sea wind can attack unchecked, it still models the silhouettes of groups of trees, making them into striking, sometimes bizarre shapes that populate the landscape and men’s imaginations like restless spirits.

A fragment of a whitebeam hedge that had been shaped by the wind in this way also remained in the park-like garden of the AMU professional training centre in Holstebro. It still tells us something about the history of the landscape, even though the site has been part of anextensive industrial estate for a long time, and is now sheltered from the nearby ring road and the open countryside by a noise barrier. In 1994, the Danish landscape architect and poet Torben Schшnherr was commissioned to plant the large noise barrier and create a low-maintenance garden between the low wings of the new training centre.

The landscape architect dealt with planting the noise barrier in a typically Danish way by laying a thick mat of broad-leaved shrubs trimmed precisely to knee height over the gently moulded mound, with their organically trimmed edges impinging on the garden itself from the outside. But this did not fulfil the actual commission of creating a meaningful place, as Schшnherr aims for a combination of poetry and garden in all his projects.“For me poems and gardens are made of the same material – from nothing into nothing – and I like this combination very much.”

For outsiders it seems that the Dane, when looking for poetic landscape elements, came across a motif that plays a central role not just in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, but also in the romantic Danish national play Elverhшj, written in 1828 by Johan Ludvig Heiberg: the elf hill, the legendary seat of the elf king and his retinue. The story has it that on special nights the hill rises into the air on columns of fire, allowing mortals an enticing but sometimes fatal glimpse of the elven realm, for anyone who enters it will never return. And in fact mounds of earth several metres high do feature in the Danish cultural landscape.