Ian Hamilton Finlay and the commonplace - book to garden and back

Abstract

The interchange between gardens and the book is extensive. There is the garden (in the form of perfected nature) considered as book: Jacques'ssomewhat dyspeptic speech about this topos - 'sermons in stones, books in the running brooks' - in Shakespeare's As You like It is well known. There is then the book considered as a garden, a complete collection of pleasing or edifying items - hence A Child's Garden of Verses, and other such titles. There are, of courses, a multitude of books on gardens, and they spread sometimes like crab grass through the tended lawns of more elevated treatises and scholarly publications. There are also not a few gardens designed to be read like books, as with the calligraphic texts found at the Alhambra or me Taj Mahal, or even designed as books, like Siah Armajani's courtyard garden for the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles, based with relentless literalism on a poem of Wallace Stevens. There are also gardens designed in books, such as Bernard Palissy's Récite Véritable for a site dedicated to exemplifying and adding its own celebration to Psalm 104; too, there are gardens that we can almost imagine as having been designed and laid out although they exist only in books from Spencer's Bower of Bliss or Rousseau's 'Elysium' for Julie to Howards End. And there are gardens designed painstakingly from books, carefully following published recipes and prescriptions for ideal layouts (thelate eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries yield many examples of this).