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REMEMBERING LITTLE SPARTA

 

PREFACE

 

PATRICK EYRES

 

It is unusual to find a garden in Britain situated at three hundred metres above sea level within the moorland terrain of sheep farming. Little Sparta is situated in the Pentland Hills of southern Scotland whose bleak moors provide a challenging environment in which to garden. Yet between 1966 and 2006, the hard graft and vision of Ian Hamilton Finlay transformed the four acres around the small upland farmstead into the well watered glades of this enchanting sylvan domain.

 

Although on a domestic scale, Little Sparta invokes the classical garden that originated in antiquity, became reanimated during the Renaissance and flourished in Britain as the landscape garden of the eighteenth-century. Indeed the terse eloquence of inscribed sculptures placed in direct relation to plantings has been described as a lyric fusion of two renowned English landscape gardens: The Leasowes, created by the poet-gardener and Finlay’s ‘mentor’, William Shenstone; and Stowe, ‘armed’ with the polemics of the political gardener, Viscount Cobham. The place is also rich in humour, irony, affection and concern for craftsmanship.

 

Ever since the emergence of watercolour landscape as an artistic genre in England, painters have been attracted by the classical garden at home and abroad; think of Cozens in Rome, Cotman at Rokeby or Turner at Petworth. Similarly, while drawn to Little Sparta’s modernity, Janet Boulton is no stranger to the gardens of Italy. Empathetic to Finlay’s poetic gardening, Boulton’s curiosity has explored the place in all seasons over the past sixteen years. Her self-ordained task has been to understand the terrain and the process of composition that unites the familiar elements of inscribed stone, plantings and landscape.

 

Her venture began in 1993 and has been sustained by week-long visits twice every eighteen months, during which she would work a nine hour day broken only by a brief respite for lunch. Finlay’s permission to paint the garden throughout the seasons was an extraordinary concession, and one that acknowledged the seriousness of the painter’s task. It is well known that Finlay was adamant that the garden only exists between June and September; hence his consistent refusal to open for visitors entry outside those months. Over the years Boulton’s task burgeoned into the major opus within her oeuvre that is represented by this exhibition. However it was the two and a half months of reflection in the immediate wake of the poet’s death that made the exhibition possible. Her residency as the guest artist at Edinburgh College of Art in the summer of 2006 provided the opportunity to take stock of her responses to Little Sparta over the previous thirteen years.

 

Janet Boulton’s art, like that of her subject, is contemporary. It embraces modernity to encompass techniques that range from watercolour and drawing to reliefs made by collage and from moulded paper, as well as foamboard maquettes for marble sculpture. It is through her evocations in different media that this body of work stands as the painter’s homage to, even a record of, the poet’s garden.