Lulah Ellender visits Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage

Visiting a garden at night requires different senses. You’re not standing on the surface looking around, you’re engulfed in the space in a multi- dimensional way. Sounds are clearer because your eyes can’t function properly; the scent of the place is infused in the darkness. Standing outside Prospect Cottage in Dungeness in the eerie twilight, I feel another sense kick in – an alertness to danger. A fox screams somewhere out on the shingle and the lights of the nearby nuclear power station sparkle as if it were a huge monster rising dripping from the sea. The sculptures and flints that punctuate the garden at Prospect Cottage take on an otherworldly feel.

A friend who’s staying at the cottage on a residency opens the front door and light washes across the pebble paths. This is my second visit to the cottage that belonged to artist, filmmaker and activist, Derek Jarman; but it’s my first time inside. And I’m a little overawed. It’s full of his artworks, books, film memorabilia and paint brushes. His signature overalls are hanging on the kitchen door, and the letters and quotidian domestic clutter accentuate the acute feeling that he’s just stepped outside to cut some rosemary for dinner. Yet Jarman died in 1994, and Prospect Cottage is now only temporarily inhabited.

Looking out to the inky garden I watch a mouse climb a silhouetted fig tree and nibble on the wizened fruit. I have to use my imagination and memory to conjure the colour and life of this garden. The first time I came here it was a sweltering midsummer day, and the sun was unforgiving, the light stark, inescapable. Jarman captured the apocalyptic feel of the place, describing it as ‘the end of the globe’. He bought the black-painted fisherman’s shack in 1987 after seeing it while scouting for a film location. In front of the cottage is a road, and then shingle that leads down to the sea. Behind it is a grassy plain, and beyond the nuclear power station.

A keen gardener since a young age, Jarman was determined to make something beautiful in this strange landscape. He had grown up hemmed in by barbed wire on various RAF bases, so the boundlessness of Dungeness felt liberating. He wrote, ‘My garden’s boundaries are the horizon’, and it retains this freedom and expansiveness today. Step off the road and you’re ‘in’ the garden, with no hedges or fences to contain you.

Jarman began his garden with a dog rose, digging in manure to fertilise the shingle and staking it against the harsh winds with a piece of driftwood. Each day he brought treasures foraged from the beach: hag stone necklaces for driftwood spires, chains, anchors, pieces of broken groynes. Amongst yellow spikes of broom he planted sea kale, poppies, irises, santolina (for healing wounds), lavender (for seeing ghosts) and rosemary (for remembrance). He built raised beds from old sleepers and filled them with straw to grow herbs.

Dungeness provided Jarman an escape from his more public life in London. Friends gathered for weekends at the beach, and the garden became a backdrop for his films. But while it was a place of retreat and respite, it wasn’t an easy garden to nurture. Dungeness is classed as a desert, with more sunshine, less rainfall, and shorter frosts than anywhere else in Britain. Yet Jarman was undaunted. He loved the sun, building stone circles to cast shadows and a sun dial to track the light. John Donne’s The Sun Rising is laser-cut into the side of the house. He worked with what he had and improvised the rest.

Gardening here was tough, physical work. And Jarman was becoming increasingly unwell. He had been diagnosed with HIV in 1986 and disease slowly shattered his body. With the help of his companion Keith Collins he continued tending his plants, using the herbs as medicine continue making art and campaigning for gay rights and AIDS awareness.

After Jarman’s death, Collins remained at Prospect Cottage, caring for the garden and keeping Jarman’s spirit alive. When he died in 2018 it was saved from being sold off by the Keith Collins Memorial Trust, who now run artist residencies (like the one my friend is on). The garden flourishes today as it did in Jarman’s time, blending hardy native and introduced species like fennel, red valerian, echiums and bright Californian poppies. Plants self-seed, ensuring the garden is constantly evolving, while still retaining the character of Jarman’s much-loved space. It’s a resilient, defiant patch of beauty in the most unlikely of places.

My friend cooks us supper on the old stove and we eat in a studio extension, surrounded by shadows and ghosts. As I leave and walk back to my car I feel I’m being watched, imagining pairs of eyes blinking in the gloom behind rocks and tangled fishing nets. The power station crouches on the shoreline. Next time, I’ll come in daylight.

Photos by George Cory
Courtesy of Creative Folkestone