A Luton Arcadia: Ian Hamilton Finlay's contribution to the English neo-classical tradition

Abstract

Abstract One of the most interesting, yet elusive themes, to emerge in this symposium has been the issue of subjectivity in garden design. Edward Harwood raised it in a fascinating way in his paper on ‘Personal identity and the eighteenth-century English landscape garden’. In broad terms, he traced a process whereby the assertion of selfhood in the early eighteenth-century garden was made more and more difficult as the century drew on: Capability Brown finally swamped the garden of the self by replacing personal with generic treatment. Yet this challenging formulation opened up further questions of method and interpretation. In what sense was it possible to think of the creator of a garden as exercising a full, untarnished subjectivity? In what sense could there be ‘gardens of desire’? Such an issue could not be determined on historical grounds alone. It was also necessary, no doubt, to have some working hypothesis about the subject, in linguistic or psychoanalytic terms, before the more substantive quest...