The film director, artist and author Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was born in Northwood, Middlesex, but after discovering he was HIV positive in 1986 he moved to Prospect Cottage, Dungeness. On his death there in 1994, he was buried in the graveyard of St Clement’s Church, Old Romney. A gay right’s activist from the 1960s, he was educated at King’s College, London, and the Slade School of Fine Art before becoming initially a set designer. In this capacity, he worked on the set of `The Devils’, an adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s account of the 17th century interrogation, torture and execution by burning of Urbane Grandier, a Catholic priest accused of devil worship, illicit relations with nuns, and witchcraft. This was by the controversial director Ken Russell. From 1976, however, with `Sebastiane’ about the Christian martyr (perhaps the only film to have been filmed solely in Latin) he started to make his own films. They had a painterly quality, betraying his own training as an artist. `Jubilee’ produced in 1977, the year of Queen Elizabeth the Second’s Silver anniversary on the throne, was one of the earliest celebrations on the punk rock movement. `The Tempest’ from 1979 was a unique retelling of the Shakespeare play, rendered with great style and theatricality. `Caravaggio’ (1986), `Edward the Second’ (1991), `Wittgenstein’ (1993) and his final film `Blue’ (1993) all testified to his wide interests, and his ability to use innovative techniques. The last in particular consists of Jarman and other narrators speaking while a single blue colour is held on the screen.
Jarman was also a gardener, and no less an authority that Christopher Lloyd of the celebrated Great Dixter in East Sussex ranked him as one of the most creative and influential in Britain of modern times. This was largely through his creation at Prospect Cottage, on the seaside near Dungeness power station. The cottage meant an enormous amount to Jarman, and in 2020 was saved by a crowdfunding campaign to be turned into a permanent memorial to his life, work and wide interests.
In `Modern Nature’ (Century, London, 1991, Vintage reprint ed by Olivia Laing 2018) Jarman kept a diary of his renovation of the garden, and his new life from 1st January 1987 till late 1990. This work is dense in references to the reasons he wanted to use certain plants, and how he wanted to use them, in the garden he was creating around the simple single storey house he had bought. Right at the edge of the Romney Marsh area, and within sight of the nuclear power stations, one of which had only just been constructed, it seemed unpromising. And yet with immense creativity, Jarman managed to bring into existence something sustainable, unique and hauntingly beautiful. The vulnerability of the plants on the pebbles and dry sand with driftwood scattered across the ground seems symptomatic of the fragile state of its creator’s health when he moved to this place.
`Dungeness,’ Jarman wrote on the 25th April, `is essentially a landscape of past endeavours: two lighthouses, two lifeboat stations, even two nuclear power stations’( `Modern Nature’, 67). He was scathing about the other model of almost contemporary gardening available in the county, at Sissinghurst Castle created by Vita Sackville-West, which he acidly described as `desolate, too immaculate’ (ibid, 121). He wanted wildness, untamed – and quirkiness. `Dymchurch,’ he admitted, `is a strange little seaside town. Built on the Roman sea wall, it’s a bric-a-brac muddle of old cottages, sunk deep in sand soil, a ditzy amusement arcade, shops selling postcards, pink rocks and shells’ (106). Quirkiness is what this environment gave him, intriguing him, and allowing him to see things, and identify memory traces in the landscape around him: `This little village once ruled the marshes. Here the jurats made `deme’, erected the gallows, and carried out royal orders to fight back the sea, building defences right to the gates of Appledore’ (106).
It is clear in his account that the rawness of this part of the Romney Marsh area appealed to him. Appledore in particular and its environs pleased him – `an oasis across the fields, its church swallowed by trees’ (141). These natural colours and shapes had immense attractiveness. He writes about them almost as though he were appraising a painting, sensitive to its colours and balance: `A journey across the sepia marshes; the last wheat field burns – the hawthorn bushes blood-red, heavy with berries; the jet black of the burnt fields and the elephant grey skies weighed down by the motionless clouds’ (141). Rye, over the border in East Sussex, gets less kindly treatment – `god-forsaken spot, all the shops dosed, all the boys wearing Bermuda shorts and bright tops’ (133). He comes back to the theme later: `We all hate Rye, twinned with Ypres – soulless shoppers, cobblestones that hurt the feet.’ Jarman was a man of clear likes and dislikes.
Dungeness was clearly not just a place he liked, but came to love. His small haven there figured in `Modern Nature’ as the last hold out against changes he saw elsewhere in the county: `Poor ruined Kent,’ he lamented in 1989, `with its ugly commuter towns, where every field and hedgerow is under siege.’ He was not coming to this place new. He had some recollection of the place in his earlier life, when, in 1963, during a college holiday, he had come to work in a betting shop in Ashford. While his body is buried in the ancient church of St Clement’s, he remains in spirit, however, in his remarkable garden, and in the testament to its construction, and of his fascinating reading of the landscape all around him in `Modern Nature.’