The Garden

Written By Kelly Murphy

Derek Jarman at Prospect Cottage

This is a story of fecundity and growth created by a person who was being ravaged by disease and societal prejudice. This is the story of an artist making beauty from desolation. This is the story of Derek Jarman and his garden. When legendary filmmaker, painter, author, and activist Derek Jarman learned that he was dying of AIDS, he purchased a small fisherman’s cabin called Prospect Cottage in Dungeress, along the Kent coast. He decided that he would create a sculpture garden in his new home in order to pass time during days of interminable sickness and to keep his focus on life. He began to nurture plants such as valerian, camomile, santolina and sea kale, and he collected driftwood and metal detritus and used that to create sculptures.

He wrote about his efforts to perfect the garden in his journals. At one point he stated, “Paradise haunts gardens, and some gardens are paradises. Mine is one of them.” Jarman died eight years after he began creating his garden paradise, but his longtime companion Keith Collins inherited the home and garden and kept it alive. After Keith sadly passed away from a brain tumor, the garden was later acquired by the Arts Fund of England and is now open for the public to visit.

The garden is a testament to Jarman’s ingenuity and love of beauty, and it remains a stunning example of regeneration, life, and a lasting reminder of the legacy of a singular artist who spent his final days attempting to create beauty in a world that he would soon leave behind. Derek Jarman was considered by some to be a “queer saint” when he was alive and after his painful and poignant battle with AIDS came to an end at the tragically young age of 52. But Jarman was too angry at injustice, too in love with pleasure, and too alive to the naughtiness of the world to ever be a saint in the traditional sense. However, what made him a spiritual vessel for tenacity in the face of cruelty of circumstance was his refusal to leave the world quietly. His final films and paintings and writings and his garden were his statements of defiance in an age where AIDS was stigmatized and its sufferers shunned. With every film and every plant that shone in the sun, Jarman simultaneously imparted wisdom and loveliness and also told those who believed he and his fellow sufferers deserved their torments to fuck off. He was a very brave man and his garden and home are now places that thousands visit every year to honor Jarman and all who were lost but not forgotten in the days of plague and terror. I leave you with something Jarman wrote in his journals that addresses someone from a future he knew that he would never get to see:

“To whom it may concern
in the dead stones of a planet
no longer remembered as earth
may he decipher this opaque hieroglyph
perform an archeology of soul
on these precious fragments
all that remains of our vanished days
here — at the sea’s edge
I have planted a stony garden
dragon tooth dolmen spring up
to defend the porch
steadfast warriors.”