Derek Jarman’s Garden
“Filmmaker Derek Jarman’s garden is one of the smallest yet most magical in this book. Decades after his death, it is still a cult destination on the bleak single headland at Dungeness. Created over eight years, it combines colorful planting with rusted metal “sculptures” and arrangements of weathered driftwood and flint. Many of the plants are native to the unearthly landscape, so can tolerate the salt-laden winds, strong sun, and low rainfall. There are strands of green broom, with purple sea kale, sea pea, cotton lavender and elder (traditionally planted to protect from witches). Jarman also introduced some species. Spring colours come from white pinks, red poppies, marigolds, irises and blue cornflower; in autumn the palette is of muted brown and skeletal grey from wood, lichens, and mosses. There are no fences, so it’s difficult to say where the garden ends. Pillars of driftwood rise above the vegetation like sentinels, and some stake dogrose or gorse, the honeyed scent of which surrounds the visitor. Jarman created sculptures from the rusted metal he found on the beach. On the south wall of the cottage are lines written from John Donne’s poem “The Sunne Rising” whose words lend the garden to a poignancy linked with Jarman’s early death in 1994. Jarman created the garden in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear reactor as therapy after being diagnosed as HIV positive. He took as his inspiration Gertrude Jekyll and his friends the gardeners Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd. In this, he succeeded so fully that, even now, the garden remains true to the magical and profoundly humane vision of its maker.”
Prospect cottage, Dungeness, Kent, UK, Derek Jarman (20th century). From the book The Gardner’s Garden.
“Gardening carries you to a fundamental place of living, rather than doing,” Sooley said. “When he was quite ill, he’d just grow the second we got onto Dungeness, gardening all day like he was breathing air.”
