Little Sparta

Little Sparta is a five-acre garden in the Pentland Hills near Dunsyre, South Lanarkshire. It was begun in 1966 by the artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay and his wife Sue. The place mixes concrete poetry, carved aphorisms and small temples with lawns, burns and a loch called Lochan Eck. Over 275 works were made with craftsmen and women over more than twenty years. The garden was first called Stonypath and renamed Little Sparta in 1983. The garden is recognised as the most important work of Scottish art by a 2004 poll of fifty artists and directors. Art historian Sir Roy Strong calls it the only really original garden made in Britain since 1945. James Campbell in the Guardian calls it one of the wonders of 20th-century art. Finlay described himself as an ‘avant-gardener’ and planned every artefact to sit in its own setting of plants, water and stone. Sue Finlay’s memoir tells how each poem-object needed daily care in summer. Visitors walk through three linked areas. The front garden holds many ‘garden poems’ in intimate spaces. A woodland garden circles a small pool with ferns and mosses. The hillside beyond has wider paths and more sculptures set among grass and heather. A later English Parkland and a walled garden called Hortus Conclusus were added after Finlay’s death. The whole composition shows how words, plants and stone can work together across the land.