Prospect Cottage stands on the spit of shingle that is Dungeness on the Kent coast, the most south easterly corner of England, sometimes known as the fifth quarter of the globe, a phrase which evocatively describes the uniqueness of this windswept, desolate landscape. The beach between the cottage and sea is littered with long abandoned fishing boats and huts, the flotsam and jetsam which has found its way into every corner of the garden. The shingle stretches in every direction as far as you can see and overlooking it all is the looming spectre of Dungeness nuclear power station.

And yet, in this most unlikely of locations, around this black timber cottage with its cheerful yellow frames, a garden has been made. An extraordinary garden, created by one man, against all the odds – this is Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage.

I’m delighted to welcome my first guest contributor to the blog. My friend Jill Francis, well known for her work on the history of the early modern garden may seem to have changed tack with this lovely piece on Derek Jarman’s garden, but as I was surprised to see maybe she hasn’t really…

The photographs are all by Jill herself,unless otherwise acknowledged. They were taken in either April 2023 or February 2025, 

Regrettably, there isn’t time here to go into the story of Jarman’s very colourful life, his art, his films, his poetry, his writing or his death from HIV Aids in 1994.  We will have to limit ourselves to Derek Jarman, the gardener, although the fact is that he only really came to gardening relatively late in his life. 

However, he writes in his diary ‘I was always a passionate gardener – flowers sparkled in my childhood as they do in a medieval manuscript’. He had a wonderful way with words. 

Jarman’s father was a senior commander in the RAF, and in 1946, when Derek was four years old, the family found themselves living in a large, requisitioned villa on the shores of Lake Maggiore, a world away from the grey, war-torn London they left behind. Little ‘Dekky’ was immersed in a cornucopia of the colours, textures, sounds and scents of sunlit Italy. The garden ran for a mile along the banks of the lake, and he later wrote in his journals of ‘cascading blossoms, abandoned avenues of mighty camellias, old roses trailing into the lake, huge golden pumpkins, stone gods overturned and covered with scurrying green lizards, dark cypresses and woods full of hazel and sweet-chestnut.’  This view, written with the benefit of hindsight may well be a little romanticised, but we get the idea!

 

A few months after his fourth birthday, he was given a book by his parents:  Beautiful flowers and how to grow them.  As he says, he can’t imagine where they found this book or why they gave it to him as he certainly couldn’t read it, but what he loved were the exquisite watercolour illustrations, which held him spellbound on many a rainy day. The book was his bible for many years as he poured over the exotic pages, scribbled with coloured crayons – he made his first drawings of flowers by copying from this book.

It is clear from this and from descriptions of his own garden that he loved flowers. He writes of childhood memories when he ‘would stand and watch the garden grow, something imperceptible to my friends: the dew-bowed peonies; the ivy stencil veins of the crocus purple and white, stamens yellow for painting, buddleia covered with tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock and humming-bird hawks; scarlet geraniums, wisteria, wallflowers, celandine with yellow brimstone flashing across the lawn’.

Much later he writes from Prospect Cottage ‘my little garden in the desert blooms …. I can look at one plant for an hour, this brings me great peace. I stand motionless and stare’. 

Jarman bought Prospect Cottage in 1986. A small, neat fisherman’s cottage, built in 1906 on the edge of the sea, which has now retreated, leaving swathes of shingle between the house and the water’s edge. 

Even on a sunny day, this is a flat, bleak and seemingly inhospitable landscape – and indeed, looks the most unlikely place in the world to try and create a garden. Bare stones, with absolutely no protection in any direction from biting winds which can bring storms and rain, or dry out everything in its path; no protection from the salty air blowing in from the sea, or the searing sunlight reflecting on the golden shingle. According to Jarman, ‘there is more sunlight here than anywhere in Britain; this and the constant wind turn shingle into a stony desert where only the toughest grasses take hold – paving the way for sage-green sea kale, blue bugloss, red poppy, yellow sedum’.

The garden famously has no walls or fences – Dungeness is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and the byelaws forbid their construction – but instead Jarman declares that his garden’s boundaries are the horizon. 

When I first went to Prospect Cottage, armed with this information, I imagined the house in an open uninterrupted landscape, with the eye stretching to the horizon in every direction. This not really the case at all – the cottage has neighbours on either side and a road in front, so although there are indeed no walls and fences, there are boundaries to the garden, albeit invisible ones. 

 To the back, which is west-facing, it is possible to shelter from the wind and soak up the afternoon sunshine and look across the Ness into the far distance, but even then, one only has to look a little to the left to see the huge grey shadow of the nuclear power station.   

This is now in the process of being decommissioned, but when Jarman was living there, the power plant was a constant presence, it ‘hummed’ continually, it glowed in the dark. He called it the “Emerald City”.  But he was very prosaic about it: ‘Unlike North Wales’, which he says ‘found itself in the backyard of Chernobyl, at least I can see it’. And he certainly wasn’t worried about it, because, not to put too fine a point on it, his life was coming to an end anyway – so one way or another didn’t really bother him. And actually, when you are there, it just forms part of the landscape and is not as intrusive as one might imagine.

The cottage is set back a few yards from the road (‘Please don’t park on the shingle in front of the house’ request the instructions for visitors), but anyone can walk right up to the house with its cheerful flowerbeds on either side of the door and wander around the whole of the garden. 

The cottage has been kept as it was in Jarman’s day, first by his partner Keith Collins, who inherited the house on his death and then, since 2018 when Collins himself died, by Creative Folkestone, so what we see now is basically as it was.

At first glance, it defies all our notions of what makes up a conventional garden (whatever that is) – there is no soil, there are no lawns, no flowerbeds, no limits. Gone are the traditional parameters within which gardeners normally work. When Jarman arrived, it was just shingle, which as he noted at the time, ‘precludes a garden’, but despite this, in a very short time (perhaps because he knew he didn’t have much time) he did, against all the odds, create this remarkable garden.

I have visited and attempted to photograph the garden twice in the last few years, once in April and once in February, when of course there are almost no flowers or colour on which to focus, but instead laying bare the structure of the garden, clearly revealing how this gives form and order to the design. As an early modern garden historian, I was thrilled to find that Derek Jarman was evidently familiar with the old garden books and herbals of sixteenth and seventeenth century England. He had a well-documented interest in all things Renaissance and Elizabethan, and refers in his diaries to books such as Thomas Hill’s Gardener’ Labyrinth and William Lawson’s New Orchard and Garden, where he will have seen woodcuts, such as this one, of simple gardens. 

These show the order and structure of the early modern garden very well: they are not embellished with colour, or details of plants, but instead rely on more permanent features such as the symmetry of the beds and the man-made additions, such as the decorative posts, the utilitarian water well, and the arbour.

 This one is more of plan, but shows very clearly the same geometry and symmetry. 

 

 

What is fascinating to see is, that if we add this arial view of the garden at Prospect Cottage (thanks to Google Earth), we can see some remarkable similarities. Now I’m not suggesting that Jarman actually modelled his garden on illustrations such as this (although of course that is possible – he was always interested in using geometric shapes and forms), but if we compare them, we can start to see that maybe this garden isn’t quite so unconventional after all…..

 We can clearly see the geometry and symmetry of the front garden, with the rectangular beds immediately under the windows, the suggestion of a larger rectangle running from the house to the road and a very obvious square bed, made of flints and gravel in the centre. Jarman also makes use of circles, and there are two large ones on either side of the square bed, and two smaller ones on the other two sides. To the side is a very definite geometric arrangement of two squares and a circle constructed from wooden boards. 

The three beds directly in front of the house are constructed from flints, found on the beach, washed up regularly by the stormy tides. These flints formed the edges of the beds, which were then infilled with different coloured stones, gravel and seashells. It took the best part of one winter for Derek to construct this bed, helped by a large plumber’s bag which enabled him to bring stones more than one at a time from the beach. This reminds us of the sheer physical effort Derek put into this garden, which flourished and grew as his health and strength faded. 

As well as flints, stones and seashells, Jarman also collected driftwood from the beach, which he then ‘planted’ as it were, upright in the ground. Not only did these contribute to the permanent structure and ornament of the garden, giving form and height particularly to more informal back garden, but they also had a practical purpose.

They protected plants from the punishing winds and the searing sun in the summer, and in the winter, marked the position of plants which had taken refuge under the shingle and were out of sight, now protecting them from unwary feet.  They also provided perches for the numerous migratory birds that pass over the Ness every year which Derek could see from his kitchen window. Many of these driftwood stakes, certainly the smaller ones, he decorated with holey stones or pieces of wood, also collected from the beach, sometimes strung into necklaces. All these have stood the test of time – they are still there, just as Jarman left them. 

Along with these natural ornaments, he also collected and added a random selection of other man-made objects: rusty fence posts and other pieces of ironwork, relics of second world war defences, bits of old engines and winches from the abandoned fishing boats, old lanterns, old windchimes, odd bits of  chain, an old trumpet – a relic from a film set – and so on and so on, picked up from the beach and elsewhere.

                                                                                                                                                                                              He also loved old garden tools which he describes as objects of both practicality and great beauty – he had one of his old hoes cast in bronze which he kept on the windowsill of his house in London – it is now displayed in Prospect Cottage. 

 

This juxtaposition of nature and the man-made, of sundry, random, anachronistic objects is reminiscent of how he put together his films and his artworks. Here he reforms them to create unique displays – all the objects are carefully placed – adding interest and texture to this sculptural garden. 

 Planting the garden was not Jarman’s original intention – once the flints, stones and other sculptural elements were in place, he decided to stop there, as he says ‘it was the bleakness of Prospect Cottage that made me fall in love with it’. 

But of course, he did not stop there. 

 

And the garden, at once a slightly bleak and austere landscape, softens to become one of colour and abundance in the summer. The striking colours of the orange and yellow California poppies, which seem to spring up in every available corner, the vibrant crimson of the common field poppies (Papaver rhoeas), the bright blue viper’s bugloss (Echium vilgare) set against the bright yellow of the door and window frames, the pink of the rock roses (Cistus) and the whites and greens of the native sea-kale (Crambe maritima) blending with the flint and stone beds at the front of the house. Colour was always of huge importance to Jarmin, just as it was in his artworks, his films and in his childhood memories.  

Before all this, in the spring, the bright yellow of the gorse is spectacular – as it is all over the headland. Derek calls it the scent of the Ness. On a hot day, the heady, honeyed, coconut smell can be almost too strong. The circles in the formal front garden are shaped with gorse, brought in from the Ness as cuttings. 

Later in the year come the mounds of Santolina chamaecyparissus  and Helichrysum with their grey foliage and yellow flowers, and bright pink Valerian (Valeriana rubra), often seen growing out of stone walls and old cottages, so quite at home here in the shingle.  The plants and flowers spill over and blur the sharp edges of the geometric shapes of the winter garden. 

 

One of the reasons for the success of the garden is that it is full of indigenous specious, brought in from the shingle of the Ness and transplanted into the garden. Although he did experiment with introducing plants, in particular roses, of which some survived and some didn’t, there is nothing fancy here, nothing exotic. Derek saw beauty in nature – and his garden is literally about working with nature, there was no point trying to fight it here, in this most inhospitable of landscapes.    

Jarman was also fascinated by the supposed healing properties of plants. He records in his diary that a neighbour gave him a gift of a purple sage, which now grows apace in his garden. This entry is immediately followed by an old proverb regarding this herb: ‘He that would live for aye must eat sage in May’. He then quotes the Elizabethan herbalist John Gerard who lists all the restorative properties of sage. In his journals, we find him returning again and again to the English Renaissance herbals. In early modern times of course, herbals were used as medical encyclopaedias, but Jarman was not naive enough to believe they could cure his condition. 

‘I water the roses and wonder whether I will see them bloom. I plant my herbal garden as a panacea, read up on all the aches and pains the plants will cure – and know they are not going to help. The garden as pharmacopoeia has failed. Yet there is a thrill in watching the plants spring up that gives me hope. Every flower is a triumph.’ 

 

Since Derek’s death in 1994, the garden has become incrementally neatened and prettied up (for want of a better word) – I wonder what he would think of the garden today – it still undoubtedly retains the spirit of its creator, but perhaps in a more sanitised way. And of course, whether we want them to or not, gardens cannot be preserved in aspic – they grow and evolve. Howard Sooley, the garden’s photographer, observed on revisiting what he remembers as the stark blank canvas of the shingle, that with the passing years, vegetation has fallen into the stones and made pockets of soil where grass now grows – never seen before on the shingle of the Ness, and certainly not by Jarman. The irony is that it is now assiduously weeded out by volunteer gardeners, anxious to preserve the austerity of the original garden. 

What Jarman created was a wonderfully artistic landscape from stones, shells and driftwood scavenged from the beach, along with old tools, discarded rusty objects and an improbable array of indigenous and introduced plants. There is a sense in which ‘you have to be there’ to really capture the spirit of the place, and it still remains, over 30 years after Jarman’s death, a defiant act of optimism, for us to explore, to immerse ourselves in and to wonder at. 

For more about on Derek Jarman’s garden, I would recommend his last book, derek jarman’s garden , with photographs by Howard Sooley (1995).  For more insight into Jarman himself, I would recommend Modern Nature: The journals of Derek Jarman, 1989-1990. All the quotations in this blog are taken from these publications.   If you wish to visit the garden at Prospect Cottage, see https://www.creativefolkestone.org.uk/prospect-cottage/

Jill Francis is an early modern historian, specialising in gardens and gardening in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, although she makes occasional forays into later gardens when they spark her interest – as here! She has taught history at the Universities of Birmingham and Worcester and lectures regularly about garden history  including as part of the Gardens’ Trust online programme, where she has been a volunteer, since 2020. She currently works in the University of Birmingham Special Collections library in the archive department, and at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon.  Her book, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales, was published by Yale University Press in 2018.