DEREK JARMAN’S GARDEN – PROSPECT COTTAGE By Jill Francis

WINTER TALK - VIA ZOOM
The garden at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness Point was created in the late 1980s by the maverick, controversial, supremely talented theatre-director and gay rights activist, Derek Jarman. The garden, built on a flat, bleak, desolate expanse of shingle in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power station almost defies our definition of a garden: it has no borders and no boundaries. Yet Jarman created 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. The result was a garden of ethereal beauty, and it still remains, 30 years after Jarman’s death, for us to explore, and to marvel at.

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 has devised and taught courses in garden history at Winterbourne House, also part of the University of Birmingham. She is an occasional lecturer in a variety of garden history groups and associations and is now particularly involved with the Gardens’ Trust online programme, both as a speaker and as a volunteer. She also works 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.