Until 1966, Ian Hamilton Finlay was primarily a short story writer and concrete poet.  In that year, Finlay and his wife, Sue, moved to a desolate area of Scotland, 25 miles from Edinburgh, that would eventually become his ornate home and gardens.  His interest in building model planes and boats eventually led Finlay to build neoclassical monuments like architectural fragments, fountains, and sundials which he placed in the gardens around his home – originally called “Stonypath” and later renamed “Little Sparta”.  His gardens are full of poems and inscriptions and a walk through Finlay’s gardens is a mental and physical journey through a landscape rich with historic allusions.  Feeling that one-word poems are impossible on paper, as there is no apparent context, Finlay became interested in placing these minimalist Western versions of the Japanese haiku in a garden where the surroundings were conceived as part of the poem.  The result is a poet’s garden that places poems among a wide range of materials such as flowers, ponds, benches, or rocks.

(British, 1925 – )