This photograph was taken in Little Sparta, the garden of the Scottish artist and poet Ian Hamilton Finlay. Years ago I was commissioned to write an article about him and went down and interviewed him. It was a good day out. Not only did I get to see the famous garden, which was closed to the public at that time, but I got to meet the man himself. In those days Finlay was never out of the news as the scourge of the Scottish art establishment, and he was also engaged in all kinds of litigation against the French government over a cancelled commission at Versailles. The newspaper got cold feet, deciding he was too hot a political potato for them to handle, and cancelled the article before I'd even finished transcribing the interview. Luckily, because I'd been commissioned I was paid anyway.

In fact it was a relief not to have to write the article because I had already realised that it was going to require an impossible balancing act. The paper wanted something nice and easy for the middle-class readers of their Sunday supplement, while Finlay was so agitated about the war he was waging with the French government and the sundry French intellectuals who had publicly besmirched his reputation - suggesting, on the flimsiest of evidence, that he harboured Nazi sympathies - that he wanted to use the piece as a launch-pad from which to dispatch salvoes of heavy artillery back across the Channel. The influence of the French Revolution on Finlay's work is profound, so to have been commissioned to create a garden in Versailles to commemorate the bicentenary of that event was, for him, of huge importance. To have had it snatched from his grasp at the last moment, thanks to the interference of various members of the chattering classes within the Parisian art scene, was a major blow to him. Finlay is not a man to turn the other cheek, or merely shrug off an insult. He comes out with all guns blazing and god help anyone who gets in his way. I definitely felt I was going to get caught in the crossfire, and that's why I was relieved not to have to write the piece.

One of the major protaganists in this French farce was the critic Catherine Millet, and Finlay vented his wrath on her by producing a beautifully executed silkscreen print showing her head in a guillotine basket. This was the sort of thing that alarmed the editors at the paper I imagine. Anyway, Catherine Millet subsequently achieved further notoriety in an altogether different sphere as this explains.

Finlay is still alive. Although elderly and not in very good health he seems to have mellowed with time. I've been back to Little Sparta a few times since, most recently with Robin who has collaborated with him on various projects and is producing a definitive book of photographs documenting the many works of art in the garden.

For an essay about Little Sparta go here. Unfortunately there's not a lot of useful material on the internet about this extraordinary place, and very few good photographs.