FOXGLOVE by Ken Worpole

‘Weather is the chief content of gardens,’ the artist and ‘avant-gardener’ Ian Hamilton Finlay once wrote, ‘yet it is the one thing over which the gardener has no control.’ This was one of the less enigmatic aphorisms from his idiosyncratic collection, ‘Detached Sentences on Gardening’. The observation came home to me with a vengeance some twenty years ago, having arranged to visit Finlay’s own garden, Little Sparta, to interview him for an essay I was writing on memorial landscapes. The trip was arranged some weeks in advance, but the day before a phenomenal blizzard covered the entire Pentland Hills deep in snow, including, of course, Little Sparta. I might as well have been on the moon. All that could be seen driving through the undulating landscape was a thick white blanket from one edge of the horizon to the other, glistening under a crystalline blue sky. As to the garden itself, it was now indistinguishable from the fields surrounding it. Finlay himself was as gnomic as I had been told he would be, and avoided answering any of the questions asked of him, preferring to deliver ex cathedra statements on the need for piety and resistance to all forms of authority except that of republican virtue – the very things that made his work both unique and at the same time troubling. 

Along with Derek Jarman, Ian Hamilton Finlay changed the way we think about landscape aesthetics, and about the meaning of place, especially those places that have been shaped or deliberately disrupted by human intervention of a religious or political intention. Both artists had found and settled in landscapes that seemed to respond to their inner natures – Finlay on the Scottish borders, Jarman on the extensive shingle beaches of Dungeness – but they had augmented their fierce identification with each of these settings with an artistry designed to bring its ‘spirit of place’ to the surface. Both were artists before they became gardeners, but in becoming gardeners they renewed themselves as artists in quite spectacular ways. 

Place is also an event in time, to paraphrase another visionary, the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck. It possesses intrinsic spatial qualities obviously, but embodies profound temporal qualities too. The two cannot be separated. What time is this place? was the question asked by the architectural theorist Kevin Lynch in the 1970s, when he took the architectural and design professions to task for reducing buildings and public spaces to three-dimensional visual and material constructions only, without taking into account temporal rhythms, patterns and rituals of use, and the multiplicity of meanings derived from human perception and mood. It is the latter that transforms spaces into places, and functional uses into emotional experiences. Both the phenomenologists and the psycho-geographers have long suggested we go beyond the traditional aesthetic injunction by asking, not what does it look like, but what does it feel like? And such feelings can change hour by hour, day by day, altering with the weather and the seasons. This is why the low-maintenance, evergreen landscaping - now increasingly found on public housing estates, business parks, supermarket car-parks, play areas and urban infilling - engenders such a depressing experience with its stolid resistance to seasonal change, variegation or complex bio-diversity.

Foxgloves’: detail of sculpture by Iain Hamilton Finlay, carved by Peter Coates, Durham Botanic Garden, 1996.

The powerful emotional interplay between human perception and the surrounding environment was present in aesthetics long before the claims of the phenomenologists however. In his series, Modern Painters, the 19th century art critic John Ruskin coined the phrase ‘the pathetic fallacy’ to criticise the Romantic poets who were forever ascribing to the natural world the emotions they were feeling personally. Storms were angry, the sky was weeping, bare moorland seemed bereft of life or meaning. Ruskin thought this was pure sentimentality, but the idea that human emotions structure and then interpret natural landscapes to fit an individual or a collective sensibility, still persists, and it isn’t hard to see why. What one generation learns to regard as a richly symbolic and meaningful landscape, especially if it is also said to represent some aspect of national identity – the Lake District for one generation, the Cotswolds for another – is as mutable as any other sentiment or affiliation. It is unsurprising that people tend to favour the places they grow up in, and express a loyalty to its distinctive landscape character, but we are all also capable of enjoying more than one landscape type, as we are of different forms and densities of human settlement. 

The question is how can artists - in whatever medium – construct, cultivate or represent landscapes that garner common appreciation and understanding? And here Finlay and Jarman once again have important things to say. For both of them, especially Finlay, inscription has played a key role in anchoring certain kinds of emotional associations to a shared sense of place. In this they have drawn on a long history of civic inscription in the city, going back, as Italo Calvino has pointed out in his essay, ‘The Written City: Inscriptions and Graffiti’, to Roman times. ‘The Roman city,’ he wrote, ‘was above all a written city, covered by a layer of writing that went across pediments, tombstones, shop-fronts.’ Roman lettering and numerals have, until only very recently, provided the dominant form in civic lettering and insignia in many parts of the world, embodying strong echoes of republican sentiment.

Little Sparta, the garden created by Finlay and his wife, Sue MacDonald-Lockhart, commemorates ideas by employing a wide array of planting punctuated by sculptures and standing stones engraved with aphorisms or historical injunctions. The use of inscription is not surprising given that Finlay himself started out working in the post-Dada field of concrete poetry. His early work – to my mind still the most engaging, before he became bitterly provocative - is largely made up of a combination of typography and images. One of my favourites is ‘Foxgloves’, an upright post of green oak, carved with a permutation of numbers by Finlay’s collaborator, Peter Coates. The sequence of numbers is that of a bell-ringing chorale, and the installation can still be found in Durham Botanic Garden. The title refers to the bells of the cathedral nearby, as well as to the foxglove flower with its stem of trumpet flowers, which are also a long-standing source of the heart-treating drug, digitalis. 

Similarly, Prospect Cottage, a weather-boarded beach chalet at Dungeness, bought by Jarman and over time crafted and cultivated into a major work of landscape art  - and like Little Sparta, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a thoroughly integrated work of art – displays on its flank wall a long quotation from the poem ‘The Sun Rising’ by John Donne. This begins, ‘Busie old foole, unruly Sunne, Why does thou thus, Through windows, and curtaines call on us?’ It is a love poem, an erotic one at that, linking a highly private interior with the constantly changing world outside, of the sun, the sea and the shingle strand in continual movement. Prospect Cottage and Little Sparta are two of the most consummate works of place-making in modern times, and continue to offer hope for the future of landscape art.

The employment of text in the public domain carries messages of meaning from one generation to the next. It why many find epitaphs and inscriptions on tomb-stones and war memorials especially moving, as with the libraries in stone constituted by churchyards and cemeteries: they are all time machines. The poignant Latin inscription Et in Arcadia Ego (loosely translated as ‘I once lived in Arcadia, as you do now’, or, more bluntly, ‘I’m dead, and you will be too’) has fascinated artists throughout the ages, most notably in the work of Poussin, whose two versions of this image made a great impact on Finlay. He made several treatments of the subject, though of such a provocative and discordant nature that is it doubtful whether Poussin would have acknowledged the debt.

At a time of a global crisis in public health, two inscriptions inspire me, memorialising their locations with a sense of historical continuity and community. The first is installed above what was once the Public Health Department of Southwark Council in south London, and unveiled on 27 September 1937: ‘The Health of the People is the Highest Law’. Translated from the Latin Salus populi suprema lex esto, this political principle was first mentioned by Cicero.

Plaque on the Public Health Department, Southwark, London, unveiled on 27 September 1937.

It was later used as a rallying cry by the Levellers during the English Civil War, before becoming one of John Locke’s fundamental rules of good government in his 1689 Second Treatise on Government. I’d like to think this governing principle might be inscribed in the public domain again, if and when we establish the ‘new normal’ of public health policy, including, for the first time as a priority, social care. Secondly, at a time when the conditions of care for the elderly are resulting in a bout of public self-questioning, the exhortation to ‘Be Kind Quickly’, inscribed on the façade of an almshouse in Reydon, Suffolk, makes an unanswerable appeal to kindness and compassion as a principle of social life.

‘Be Kind Quickly’: inscription on almshouses at Reydon, Suffolk, named ‘The Rest’. Opened 1908.

In his diaries Derek Jarman recalls telling artist Maggi Hambling about his ambitions for Prospect Cottage:

‘I was describing the garden to Maggi Hambling at a gallery opening. And said I intended to write a book about it. 

She said: ‘Oh, you’ve finally discovered nature, Derek.’

‘I don’t think it’s really quite like that,’ I said, thinking of Constable and Samuel Palmer’s Kent.

‘Ah, I understand completely. You’ve discovered modern nature.’

Modern nature is something new, and offers a new aesthetics of place. Prospect Cottage garden was not only a bricolage of old and new architectural and topographical elements, but, for Jarman, a ‘therapy and pharmacopoeia’. So was Little Sparta for Finlay. Place is what we make and in turn it makes us.  The process has another name: history.