Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Socketed in the Pentland Hills, amid rolling farmland south-west of Edinburgh, a low stone cottage is hidden up a dirt track, shielded front and back by bushy gardens. Through a wooden side gate, a path meanders to an old piggery, a vegetable patch and run-offs for rainwater: two ponds with gurgling pipe chutes, a little burn and a largish lochan. Ducks glide happily, with moorland and hilltops in the distance. Spring frogs are beginning to croak in the bulrushes. It is a modest, traditional smallholding, where an owner could just about scratch a living. Instead, its former resident, the late artist-poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, turned it into his most famous and most idiosyncratic artwork.\u00a0This year marks the centenary of Finlay\u2019s birth, and his singular legacy is being celebrated in May with a book and series of exhibitions in eight galleries from Edinburgh to London and Basel, all titled Fragments, and curated and edited by Pia Maria Simig. Notable are those at Ingleby Gallery and at Victoria Miro; the latter will show works in wood, stone and neon. Particularly interesting are some of the guillotine-themed pieces that brought Finlay to international attention in the late 1980s, when his interest in social revolution gave him a spiky, head-turning cachet.\u00a0But it is the Pentland cottage-garden, gifted to Finlay and his wife Sue by her family, that remains the most enchanting draw. In the 1960s, when the newly-weds moved in, the estate was gloomily called Stonypath, and a single ash tree stood in the garden.\u00a0Over the course of the Finlays\u2019 40-year occupation, it was reborn as Little Sparta, a kind of live-in artwork spread over seven acres. Sculptures and landscaping by Finlay gradually filled the garden with ideas, designed to make cryptic allusions to classical myths, maritime adventure and antiquity. The name was inspired by the Spartans, warriors who \u2014 like the artist \u2014 had a plucky and somewhat isolationist fighting spirit.By most accounts, including his own, Finlay was a mercurial figure. He asked for a single occupation to be inscribed on his family headstone \u2014 poet \u2014 but art and language were always intertwined in his work. After early study at Glasgow School of Art, he moved into concrete poetry. Later, he became a great polymath and collaborator. This brought the art world to Little Sparta, rather than taking Finlay into it: he was reluctant to rub shoulders in the clubby galleries, but proved adept at transferring his playful, fragmentary verse to works on paper, stone and other media, aided by other craftspeople.\u00a0At the cottage, a damp ground-floor bedroom cheered by a wood-burning stove, books, Olivetti typewriter and model sailboats was his self-declared \u201ccommand central\u201d.\u00a0Here he used his library as \u201chis palette\u201d, says head gardener George Gilliland.Gilliland has a difficult set of jobs \u2014 looking after the garden almost single-handed, but also managing the fragile stone artworks. \u201cIf you were thinking of planning a garden this isn\u2019t the place to do it,\u201d he says wryly. At an altitude of 300m, surrounded by the moors stretching from the Pentlands, Little Sparta is high enough to catch wind, rain and all the elements \u2014 a storm has ripped through and taken down a score of trees when I visit.\u00a0But the Finlays, showing a determination that became part of Little Sparta\u2019s mythology, created a windbreak, and began to build up the greenery with \u201cgarden thugs\u201d such as cranesbill, periwinkle, astrantia, sweet Cicely and rosebay willow herb, a tough fireweed that Finlay called his \u201cobstreperous companion\u201d. The somewhat iconoclastic plantings in the garden \u2014 including trees close together \u2014 reflected his more general contempt for received wisdom. \u201cHe took a stance over all sorts of authority, and had strongly held principles,\u201d says Gilliland. The garden has a strong motif; it is a \u201ca garden of the sea\u201d, says Gilliland. The sea and the boyish romance of sailing \u2014 but also the danger and mystery of maritime adventure \u2014 were particular obsessions for Finlay. There are flagstones inscribed with names of historical vessels \u2014 caravel (Portuguese explorers\u2019 sailboat), boomie (large-masted Thames barge), cog (warship of the Middle Ages) \u2014 and trees planted so that the leaves\u2019 shadows mimic the play of light on water.\u00a0Mischievous tricks meet you at every corner: a gate\u2019s pillars are topped with sculpted stone hand grenades, resembling and mocking the status-symbol pineapples once all the rage in the 17th century. A patch of the piggery\u2019s slate roof is sprayed gold, nudging at the story of Philemon and Baucis, the kindly old couple of Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses who showed hospitality to gods in disguise and were rewarded with a temple. Classical sources were just as important to Finlay as maritime ones: there\u2019s even a temple to Apollo, which in superbly wily fashion, Finlay leveraged as a tax break, arguing to the local council that it was a place of worship and should be accounted as such. (Inevitably, this didn\u2019t go down well.)In the garden\u2019s early years, Finlay made a \u201cbig leap, moving his poetry into the landscape\u201d, says Gilliland. Many of the pieces are poems or words and verse fragments etched into stone, made by local stonemasons to Finlay\u2019s instructions, and in collaborations with font designers such as Michael Harvey, who also created typefaces for Faber & Faber. The scheme was improvised and added to, bit by bit, over the years. \u201cIt acted as a testing ground for ideas, but it is a sequence of poetic conceits \u2014 it\u2019s deliberate,\u201d adds Gilliland.\u00a0For most of the year, Gillilland works here alone. \u201cThe garden is meant to be solitary, the paths are narrow and twist to a point of no return \u2014 that\u2019s part of discovery,\u201d he says. In the \u201cEnglish parkland\u201d section at the back of the house, there is even a parallel track of beech hedge for a \u201chuff lane\u201d where a bad mood could be secluded and hopefully cured with a contemplative sit on one of the benches. True to his exacting vision, the garden is only open in the summer months, when Finlay thought it had most to offer. As a whole, Little Sparta is \u201clike a cryptic crossword puzzle\u201d, says Gilliland. \u201cIt\u2019s a place that allows you to think.\u201dLittle Sparta is open June-September (littlesparta.org.uk); victoria-miro.com; inglebygallery.com; \u201cFragments\u201d, published by\u00a0ACC Art Books <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Socketed in the Pentland Hills, amid rolling farmland south-west of Edinburgh, a low stone cottage is hidden up a dirt track, shielded front and back by bushy gardens. Through a wooden side gate, a path meanders to an old piggery, a vegetable patch and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":279624,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-279623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279625,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279623\/revisions\/279625"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}