To boldy grow… Moves to protect weird and wonderful gardens and landscapes
They broke new ground and allowed a fresh, new playful vision to grow.
Now moves are being made to protect Scotland’s modern gardens and landscapes with Historic Environment Scotland searching for the best post-war spaces where new ideas flourished.
Led by pioneers such as Charles Jencks of the Garden of Cosmic Speculation at Portrack House and Ian Hamilton Fin lay, who devised Little Sparta sculpturalgarden in the pent lands, scotland’ s embrace of the modern landscape holds firm.
Urban features, such as the municipal mushrooms made of concrete in Glenrothes and the campus of stirling university also illustrate a willingness to boldly grow a new style of space.
Historic Environment Scotland now hopes to add more post-war landscapes to the nation’s Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.
Dr Julie Candy, senior designations officer at Historic Environment Scotland, said Scotland’s modern landscapes and gardens were “an overlooked part of our post-war heritage” with a project now to identify, record and celebrate the spaces now underway. We think gardens and designed landscapes dating to 1945 to thee arly2000s are currently under represented in our records.
"As part of a new project, we’ll be busy recording sites, improving our online records and considering the most important places for designation on the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.”
The Little Sparta Garden by Ian Hamilton Finlay and his wife, Susan, at Stonypath in the western Pentland Hills, near Edinburgh, is perhaps one of Scotland’s most intriguing spaces. Dr Candy described it as a “a unique sculptural garden recognised internationally for its innovation and unusual beauty ”. she added :“both poetic and provocative, the garden is created from the open fields and buildings of a former farm. Short word pieces and poems are carved in granite, marble, slate, garden tools and wood. Sculptures stand in woodland glades, across streams, or in heather where the garden edge meets the moorland beyond.
“The artworks, produced in collaboration with other artists and craftspeople, explore themes of classical mythology, order and disorder, civilisationand chaos, war and these a. Hamilton Finlay died in 2006, having barely left Little Sparta in 40 years. His legacy and collaborationslive on in this amazing modern landscape .”
She also paid tribute to Charles Jencks, who died in 2019, describing him as“anothergiant of the landscape world ”. The founder of the Maggie’s Centres for cancer care, his land-based artwork projects can be found in Scotland, England, Milan, New York, and South Korea.
Jencks’ Landform Ueda in Edinburgh bridges the gap between the Scottish National Galleries’ Modern One and Modern Two galleries. It is a grass-covered, stepped, serpentine mound with two large crescent-shaped pool sand a small tooth-shaped pool.
Jencks’ other works in Scotland include the Garden of Cosmic Speculation at Portrack House, and the more recent Crawick Multiverse, Sanquhar, both in Dumfries and Galloway. The Colzium Lennox Estate in Kilsyth is the newest addition to Scotland’s national inventory of gardens.