Ian Hamilton Finlay’s son Alec Finlay on the centenary of his father's birth in The World of Interiors

'IHF – as Ian Hamilton Finlay was known in tribute to the Scottish poet Robert Louis Stevenson, or RLS – was a poet of marble and mutability, force and lyrical sensitivity, Doric columns and the gently nodding bog cotton of our Pentland hillside. His most identifiable style may be the word inscribed in stone, but he experienced language as a Heraclitan and oracular medium. To him, the poem was an exemplary device that had a gift for revealing the metamorphoses words contain. The internationally known garden at Stonypath (known since 1983 as Little Sparta), which fuses the poem-as-object with the composed landscape, was a metamorphosis too. And, as IHF and Sue, my mother, were well aware, without constant vigilance the spot was likely to return into the wild arms of the moor around it. ‘He builds the paths and she plants the flowers,’ as I used to say of them.'

Image: photograph of Ian Hamilton Finlay flying his model gliders over Dunsyre Hill in the Pentlands to illustrate Ceolfrith 5, published on the occasion of an exhibition held in November 1970 at the Bookshop Gallery in Sunderland. Photograph: Diane Tammes

April 23 2025