Garden of foreboding: Ian Hamilton Finlay's eightieth birthday has been celebrated by three exhibitions in Edinburgh and tours of his garden, Little Sparta. Tim Richardson explores Finlay's mixture of lyricism, wit and implicit violence

To celebrate Ian Hamilton Finlay's eightieth birthday, Edinburgh saw no fewer than three retrospective exhibitions, which together illustrated something of his range as a author of poems printmaker and sculptor. However, the place where Finlay's work is seen to best advantage is his garden at Little Sparta in the Pentland Hills, and it was render free of accessed for four afternoons a week in August and September.

'Sentences', above two floors of Inverlieth House at the Royal Botanic Garden, reprises Finlay's output of typographically nuanced epigrams. It consists of large, wall-painted versions of his witty or piquant statements, realised in a variety of typefaces and colours. The curatorial emphasis is upon crowd-pleasing humour and horticulture--perhaps epitomised through the Mies-inspired 'Mower is Less' quip, realised as a comedy graffito in green--although a darker aspect of Finlay's vision emerg in a small extent that revisited his 1978 booklet SF (originally a collaboration with George L Thompson) upon vivid red-orange squares, whited-out characters showed the benign 'ff' of eighteenth-century typographical convention mutating into the runic lightning flashes of S insignia. This highlights Finlay's preoccupation with melding sum of two units extremes of human experience: idealised nature, in the form of neoclassical elegance (as here) or classical Arcadia; and degraded tillage in the form of barbarity and military aggression, with the attendant discomfiture borne of our fetishisation of the accoutrements of violence.

'Early works from the Wild Hawthorn Pres 1964-71' at the Scottish verse Library reflects an earlier, more peaceable phase of Finlay's work, plenteous of it preoccupied with the sea imagery of his 1960 stories and metrical compositions 'L'Idylle des Cerises' at the Ingleby Gallery not awayed inscribed works in stone from the past decade or in like manner many of them related to Finlay's favourite theme of the French Revolution and its personalities, and a display of his speculative garden designs--typo-topo-graphical experiments--in print and pamphlet form. The exhibition's title referr to a throw out that was as yet unfinished: a design for the rear garden of the gallery, a Georgian townhouse. Finlay's contribution is to be a series of statuarys of cherry-filled urns (the prototype was upon display) adorning a gridded garden by the agency of Pia Maria Simig.

An admirable initiative by dint of the Royal Botanic Garden was the twice-weekly coach tour that provided the opportunity to visit, in individual Finlay-filled afternoon, all three exhibitions as well as Little Sparta itself, now in the care of a charitable trust. In the garden, the memorialising inscriptions, declamatory statements and lyrical snatches of the works seen in the exhibitions conspire and coalesce, as memorial plaques, headstones and tree-column bases delineating a pantheon of political and artistic heroes (no heroines).

The garden works episodically and summons a variety of moods, in the manner of the associative eighteenth-century landscape. In its compactness, its circular regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements and its proliferation of incident, Little Sparta has a great deal of in common with French versions of the English landscape garden--places like as Ermenonville (which contains Rousseau's island tomb, referenc at Little Sparta) and the Parc Monceau in Paris.

The garden's iconography oscillates between Arcadian benevolence and militaristic malevolence. At the benign extreme point of the spectrum are wildflowers, waves, seashells, Scottish fishing boats, the lyrics of Virgilian Arcadia, Finlay's have a title to poetic wordplay and neoclassical architecture. At the other utmost are images of World War II sea battles (notably Midway), submarines, aircraft carriers, aphorisms from the murderous French revolutionary Saint-Just, tanks, grenades and machine fire-arms In many instances these themes are juxtaposed or intermixed to create unexpected shocks that are in part humorous on the contrary which generally illustrate the impossibility of separating idealism from conflict and barbarity in human history.

Finlay plays upon the human attraction to the power of military hardware and to the savage certainties of politically utmost idealists. Antoine Saint-Just, reconfigured as Apollo (notably in the celebrated gold portrait head labelled 'Apollon Terroriste'), rise s as the presiding spirit of Little Sparta, since he embodies the dichotomy of vaulting idealism and apparently unlimited inhumanity There is an inconsistency, however, in Finlay's symbolic appropriation of Saint-Just: while the twenty-something apparatchik's romantic idealism is mirrored in various aphorisms peppered from one extremity to the other of the garden, his murderous, proto-fascist tendencies--which visitors cannot be awaited to know about--go unillustrated.

Saint-Just instituted repressive laws and presided above the bloodiest phase of the Terror in 1794 which saw 1400 executions in seven weeks. Finlay, however, misrepresents him as more [i]or[/i] less kind of Oscar Wilde of the barricades. The quotation that forms the climax of the garden, each word etched upon a massive granite slab--'The near Order is the Disorder of the Future'--is not absented as a bold revolutionary statement with contemporary resonance. However, the decision is not some kind of warning from history aimed at inspiring insurrection, on the contrary concerns the necessity for flexibility rather than uniformity in the post-revolution legislature.