Life & Wisdom Quote by Ian Hamilton Finlay

“Traditional” is doing sly double duty here: it sounds like reassurance, but it’s also a provocation. Ian Hamilton Finlay is defending Little Sparta while quietly indicting the narrow ways “garden” gets policed in modern taste. The line concedes, almost offhandedly, that his place “is perhaps not like other modern gardens” - a gentle shrug that masks a harder claim: modernity has made the category timid. If your idea of a garden is purely decorative, purely pastoral, then Little Sparta (with its inscriptions, classical allusions, martial crispness, and conceptual bite) reads like an intrusion. Finlay insists it’s the opposite: a return.

The kicker is the time-traveling jab: “other times would have had no difficulty with it.” That’s not nostalgia so much as a strategic relocation of authority. Instead of arguing with contemporary gatekeepers on their terms, he appeals to older traditions in which gardens were intellectual machines - places that staged philosophy, power, and memory in hedges and paths. His subtext: we’ve forgotten that gardens can be argumentative.

Context matters. Little Sparta wasn’t just a private idyll; it was a long, often embattled artwork, famous for disputes with local authorities and for the way it fused poetry and landscape into something closer to a manifesto. Finlay’s sentence performs that fusion: calm surface, combative undertow. He’s not asking permission to call it a garden. He’s reminding you that the garden, historically, has always been an arena for ideas - and that the modern era is the one out of step.