Janet Boulton Paintings & paper relief works, Recent Texts

"Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks". So said Ian Hamilton Finlay, whose garden, Little Sparta, in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh,is recognised as one of the most important of the past 50 years. It is an artist's and a poet's garden full of layers of meaning. Everyone who sees it is intrigued and moved by its allusive inscriptions and artwork.

There. I've done it. I've separated garden inscriptions from artwork when they should be the same thing. Janet Boulton would be furious. She is an artist, friend and disciple of Hamilton Finlay, and her exhibition Remembering Little Sparta, at Edinburgh College of Art, closes at the end of this month.It includes paintings and paper reliefs, as well as photos of inscription work in her garden near Oxford, much influenced by Hamilton Finlay. For Boulton, art can be on a canvas or in words in a garden.

Garden inscriptions are nothing new. From Ancient Rome to great 18th-century gardens such as Stow, words have added a challenging layer of meaning-even a political agenda. An attack, in fact. Many a hobby gardener now puts words into gardens.The jokey "Beware-Head Gardener" notice. The gravestone of a beloved pet (I fancy RequiesCat in Pace). The odd romantic line of Housman inscribed on a slate stele.Chelsea Show gardens are full of inscriptions.But it's a rare gardener who takes the idea forward to make inscription more than a visual pun or a sentimental tag, who uses inscription to make something that engages the mind, something that is an expression of his or her creation to the world. Art, that is.

Boulton's garden is a long thin strip behind a terraced house, with an inscription at every turn. She trained at the Camberwell School of Art in the 1950s and has always loved Cubism, which is reflected in the garden.On an oak beam labelled Les Demoiselles d'Abingdon stand several plant pots of gravel, each holding a large label that bears the name of a sweet flower.It's a tribute to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and also to pots as used by Hamilton Finlay.

Farther on, two sheets of glass stand upright just a couple of centimetres apart, framing the plants behind. On the front sheet is etched "Nature Morte"-still-life, one of her preferred areas of painting-but on the rear sheet, immediately behind Nature Morte, the words are repeated the other way round. To look from behind, it is saying, would offer totally different perspective on the image. It offers more than a view of something at the same time, just as the Cubists did. It's about provocation.

Boulton's garden is divided into a series of spaces, not so much rooms as one long serpentine path with living screens crossing the garden on diagonals. A shady door from the garden is signed LAWN, as if leading to the sunny verdure that she has always wanted. In the central space is a piece of wood inscribed HEARTH because this is the core of the garden. But in that word is also HEART, ART EARTH...all ideas pulling in the same direction. The odd thing, you might say, is that there is nowhere by the hearth to sit. Nowhere much anywhere,come to that; just house at one end and studio at the other. In this garden, art is what it's about, the ideas it offers. In this garden, art is settled, but with, if you pursue them, geologically deep layers of meaning.

Amazingly, Boulton used to belong to the school of shop-now, plant -later gardeners, until, seeing Little Sparta, she realised that something was missing and began to think about inscription and allusion.Today she can take or leave plants (the garden is strong, there is no need for more), and, exhausted from building this Edinburgh exhibition, she says that garden visiting is the last thing she would do to relax. Why? Because gardens demanding's full attention.Good ones attack you.

But do all these fascinating pieces add up to something greater than the sum of their parts? Garden or gallery? Although it does not lessen their individual attractions, the answer, from an outsider's point of view, is probably gallery. What they do comprise is a portrait of the artist herself, which is fine: it is a private garden, after all,made to please no one but herself.Even so, part of me longs for the whole garden to be as striking as the artwork. A gateau, as well as a box of wonderful chocolates.

Still, Boulton is right to make pieces absolutely personal.That's how one should approach inscription. Feel it. Reason it. Make it. If it's tosh (and it may be),at least it ill be your thinking and it will add meaning for you. Be as ambitious and multilayered as you like; indulging ambition to the limit is the ultimate luxury of private gardens.