Derek Jarman’s Garden

The 30th anniversary edition of a contemporary masterpiece, a visual and narrative exploration of the artist and activist Derek Jarman’s singular, paradisiacal garden which he tended throughout his illness, set in a most inhospitable place.

“Paradise haunts gardens,” writes Derek Jarman, “and it haunts mine.” Before his death, Jarman’s public image was as a filmmaker of genius, whose work, dwelling on themes of sexuality and violence, became a byword for controversy. But the private man was the creator of his own garden-paradise in an environment that many might think was more of a hell than a heaven—in the flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle that faces the nuclear power station in Dungeness, Kent. Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter’s eye, his horticultural expertise, and his ecological convictions to produce a landscape that combined the flints, shells, and driftwood of Dungeness; sculptures made from stones, old tools, and found objects; the area’s indigenous plants; and shrubs and flowers introduced by Jarman himself.

This book is Derek Jarman’s own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to 1994, the last year of his life. More than 150 photographs taken by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages and at every season, images that reveal the garden’s complex geometric plan, its magical stone circles, and beautiful and bizarre sculptures. We also catch glimpses of Jarman’s life in Dungeness: walking, weeding, watering, enjoying life.

Derek Jarman’s Garden is the last book Jarman ever wrote. Like the garden itself, it remains as a fitting memorial to a brilliant and greatly loved artist who, against all odds, made a breathtakingly beautiful garden in the most inhospitable of places. For both gardeners and the legions of admirers of this extraordinary man, this 30th anniversary edition, with a foreword by Jamaica Kincaid, marks three decades of the book as a gardening classic, and the ongoing impact of Jarman’s transformative garden, proof of the garden as a space not just of retreat but of ideas, philosophy, and myth.

• “Derek Jarman’s is a garden that truly acknowledges what any attempt at Eden is all about.”

  Jamaica Kincaid

• "Derek Jarman’s garden is an act of hope and defiance."

  Jonny Bruce, head gardener at Prospect Cottage