Ian Hamilton Finlay, 80; Scottish Artist’s Work Centered on Nature

Ian Hamilton Finlay, 80, one of Scotland’s best-known artists whose work included sculpture, poetry and philosophy, died Monday at a nursing home in Scotland after a long illness, said Victoria Miro, a spokeswoman for his gallery in London.

The artist’s relationship with nature lay at the heart of his work, and his most famous is “Little Sparta,” the garden of his farmhouse at Stonypath in Dunsyre, southwest of Edinburgh.

Born in 1925 in Nassau, Bahamas, Finlay moved to Edinburgh in 1950.

In 1966 he moved to Stonypath and set about transforming the plot into a neoclassical sculpture garden.

Every surface, from benches to headstones and obelisks, is inscribed with his words. Stonypath was recently voted Scotland’s greatest artwork.

Finlay’s first permanent outdoor installation in the United States was constructed at UC San Diego in 1987.

Large stones are inscribed with a one-word poem, “UNDA,” the Latin word for wave, along with the typographer’s wavy notation indicating the transposing of letters. And from the installation site on an open, grassy field atop a bluff, the viewer can look out at the Pacific Ocean’s waves.

“He wanted to put language into the landscape, and that’s what he was doing with Little Sparta,” Mary Beebe, director of the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego, told The Times.