Life & Wisdom Quote by Ian Hamilton Finlay

Finlay is quietly refusing the modern myth of the solitary genius. Coming “to these mediums” through the garden, he frames his practice as something stumbled into by way of place-making, not an art-world climb up the ladder of “mediums” (a word that usually signals professionalism, categories, careers). The garden is his origin story, but also his argument: a garden is never authored in the single, romantic sense. It is planned, planted, tended, weathered, revised. Time and contingency are co-creators.

The key turn is “of course,” that lightly barbed phrase poets use when they want to smuggle a provocation in under the guise of common sense. “People who have designed gardens have always worked in collaboration” reads like a historical claim, but it’s also a rebuke to the gallery-era fetish for signature and ownership. Finlay’s own work at Little Sparta depended on masons, carvers, architects, gardeners - the visible hand is often not his. He’s not apologizing for that; he’s insisting it’s the point.

“Never made their own inscriptions” is the sharpest line: the inscription is the locus of authorship, the place where language brands matter. By saying garden designers don’t carve their own words into stone, Finlay separates writing from fabrication, idea from execution, and makes the split feel traditional rather than compromised. Subtext: collaboration doesn’t dilute the poem; it hardens it into the world. The poet’s authority isn’t in the chisel stroke, but in orchestrating how text, object, and landscape conspire to mean.