Dunsyre, Lanark, South Lanarkshire ML11 8NG

Little Sparta has the distinction of being one of only two gardens which are cited when people wish to indicate that gardens and art are a serious conjunction - the other is 'The Garden of Cosmic Speculation'. These are not the only such gardens at all, (try Clearbeck, Lancashire, for example) but they are what lazy people think of and automatically refer to.

The garden has been made by Dr Ian Hamilton Finlay, an artist also known for his poetry, plays, stories, prints and sculpture. The garden is spoken with invariably with reverence, even by people who have never seen it. I was appalled recently when Robin Lane Fox praised it as follows in the Financial Times: "a vision as elegant as the great 18th century gardeners around Pope and Kent (sic) but even wittier and more disturbing" then cheerfully admitted: "I have never seen the results on the ground".

What if it didn't really exist?

I thought it was magical when I was there. Well, I thought it was definitely a garden for those (like me) who read cereal packets at breakfast. In other words, a garden for obsessive readers rather than obsessive gardeners; certainly rather than obsessive plant collectors.

It's a treasure hunt; a garden full of tombstones. It's fun. Is the ghastly orange potting shed deliberate? It has avenues and urns which refer us to posher gardens, older gardens where you might also, as here, find poetry, liberal use of Latin and reminders of the classical world. So it seems part of a tradition. It offers a magical trip, with some truly exciting moments, especially following a rough path up a small rise and being suddenly shocked by a lake. A totally romantic lake, complete with a black swan. (perfect touch - how do you get one of those?!)

There is a large area where the garden seems to be turned inside out, rather like the garden at Arnmore House in Bournemouth - also the garden of an artist, in that case a musician and composer. At Arnmore, I understand, the maker kept most of what he inherited from the previous owner in the middle of his garden, which was at the back of a large, classic Victorian street house. He then sculpted, topiarised or ornamented whatever it was - generally trees, shrubs, maybe a rose. These are scattered around in empty space, which is what creates the inside out feel.

At Little Sparta the effect is similar - random garden items - trees, plants, small beds, arising out of nowhere as artefacts in their own right rather than coherent and subsidiary parts of a border. So, at Little Sparta a path edged by currant bushes winds around in a place still closely resembling a field, and the path goes nowhere in particular, it's just there. Why shouldn't an avenue be a sculpture? Or maybe it's just part of some future development? It does need to grow a bit to become either.

A place like this (and just what is that?- Discuss), especially given its advance publicity as 'art' will put you (me) in a particular frame of mind - reflective, pleasured, available. I find my senses sharpened, I become willing to notice the beauty and particularity of a tree trunk which might well just have been a tree trunk otherwise.

And on the whole Little Sparta is inclusive, not excluding - except, of course, for the extensive use of Latin, which really is no longer part of our culture. Punning also used to be part of our culture; school magazines used to be full of it, just as Little Sparta is, but, like the Latin, this now refers to a fading world.

Little Sparta. © Charles Hawes

So it is a garden of memorials and a memorial garden, with war everywhere, just as war actually is; together at Little Sparta with jokes, fun, flashes of beauty. Stiles, bridges and walls are transformed into poems. It is over packed with stuff - 250 items in maybe five acres. Ian Hamilton Finlay says, somewhere in the garden: "Little walks by purling streams And through cornfields thickets &c are delightful entertainments" and this neatly sums up the garden: it is a delightful entertainment.

But later I found myself allowing a little regret that it is so ungardened. By that I don't mean it as untidy, though, of course, it was end of season and very ragged. I think that the glory of what a garden can do with poetry or sculpture, or, more ambitiously, with the expression of ideas, is in the conjunction of those things with the essential elements of a garden. That is, the use of plants, form and space working with the sculpture/poetry or even better, the ideas. Apart from the rather claustrophobic part near the house, which feels a bit like a cottage garden colonised by artefacts and a bit like a wood, the garden is relatively formless: 'little walks' is right. The gardening is not as exciting or interesting as the sculpture/poetry/ideas, - a balance is missing. It tends more to sculpture park than garden.

It is a wonderful place rather than a wonderful garden. I think that may always have been the intention, and the gardening world has simply, unquestioningly, taken it into its own domain.

If you have any comments about this review, please email me at anne@veddw.co.uk