Book review: Derek Jarman’s Garden

Derek Jarman’s Garden

By Derek Jarman and photographs by Howard Sooley

Jarman’s Garden was initially released in 1995 a year following his death from Aids and was re-reprinted in 2021.  It is a very personal final book - by artist, filmmaker, theatre designer and activist Derek Jarman on his life and garden at Prospect Cottage in Kent from 1986 to his death in 1994.  The book is part diary, part narrative and part poetry interspersed with beautiful photographs of the garden’s development and across the seasons and of Jarman himself - walking, weeding, watering, or just enjoying life.

In 1987, Derek Jarman bought a former fisherman’s cottage on the beach at Dungeness Beach in Kent on impulse using an inheritance from his father.  The year before he bought Prospect Cottage, Jarman was diagnosed with HIV.

The cottage and garden are situated in a wild bleak place framed by a nuclear power station on one side and the grey waves of the English Channel on the other.  Jarman painted the walls of his new home tar black and its window frames buttercup yellow.  He saw Prospect Cottage as integral to the landscape.

“There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.” – Derek Jarman   

Jarman was not intimidated by his harsh environment which has the strongest sunlight, lowest rainfall in Britain, is regularly pounded by fierce salty winds and is on poor stony shingle soils. In his bright wildflower garden, he encouraged the area's indigenous plants and introduced others including foxgloves, periwinkle, poppies, purple iris, bluebells, sea kale as well as coercing old roses and fig trees back to bloom.

This is no fancy manicured garden and he created it on a shoestring, digging gardens in the shingle by hand and carrying in manure. He framed his flower gardens with collections of stones he found on the beach which he arranged in circles, adding driftwood, antique tools and objects he found nearby to create random sculptures.  

"Paradise haunts gardens," writes Derek Jarman, "and it haunts mine."

Prospect Cottage was Jarman’s oasis and solace. It was also where he shot films, painted pictures, created sculptures, entertained friends and wrote his diary that was to become the book Modern Nature.  Jarman’s energetic approach to his garden was in part a response to the despair of his pre-combination therapy and in the 1990’s a near certain death sentence.  

The garden was his stake in the future and also led him to remember his past as he reacquainted himself with plants, he had been fond of as a boy and his unhappy childhood.  His father had been an RAF pilot and the family often moved, including periods in Italy and Pakistan.  His father ensured they lived a regimented life and he often threw insults at Derek such as “pansy” or “lemon” and one story was that once he threw him through a window.
 
“Flowers spring up and entwine themselves like bindweed along the footpaths of my childhood.”  - Derek Jarman

Towards the latter part of the book, Jarman dwells more on his time in hospital (from 1990) and he remains cheerful despite what is clearly a time of agony and terror.

Jarman died in 1994, aged 52. Five years earlier, in the same week that he publicly announced he had HIV, he wrote in his diary:

“Apart from the nagging past – I have never been happier […] I look up and see the deep azure sea outside my window in the February sun, and today I saw my first bumble bee. Planted lavender and clumps of red-hot poker.”

Jarman’s Garden is an interesting and easy read with a real message. It is well designed with photographs on most pages (150 in total, 90 were in colour) beautifully shot by Jarman’s friend Howard Sooley.  Well worth a read.

Gardener and author Monty Don, once described Jarman’s book as” the best Gardening book ever written. It’s perfect”.

Black Teal Books rating: 8/10