ABSTRACT
Derek Jarman’s garden stands out in the shingle landscape by its vivid colours: Christopher Lloyd describes how he saw ‘some brilliant flower colour…in a flat landscape…scattered with huts and sporadic habitations, with pylons and overhead cables and power lines’.6 A green paradise in the barren landscape of a nuclear power station would naturally seem to be inhabited by the themes of life and death. Indeed, Derek Jarman s garden, established during the last years of his life, ‘merged with Derek’s struggle with illness, then contrasted with it, as the flowers blossomed while Derek faded’.7 And survival lies at the very origins of how Derek Jarman conceived and developed the garden since it ‘started accidentally: a sea-worn driftwood staff topped with a knuckle of beachcombed bone was used to stake a transplanted dog rose, and an elongated lowtide flint protected a seedling seakale from careless feet. Over the coming year more beachcombed treasures were added.’8 The plants in Derek Jarman’s garden are thus locally found plants, such as gorse, broom and blackthorn blossom, adapted to the (salt saturated) soil and climate: ‘Sea kale (Crambe maritima) is the
dominant plant, more abundant here than anywhere else in the British Isles. It is the first coloniser above the tideline, with tap roots
that delve in search of moisture. Jarman quoted twenty foot as a root length, measured on a plant that had become exposed after a storm.9 But Derek Jarman also transplanted to his garden local plants that were growing in other parts of Dungeness. He thus tells the story of how ‘once, when I was transplanting a small seedling to the garden, I was assaulted by an ecological puritan from Canterbury.’10 One must remember that Dungeness is an ‘SSSI’, a ‘Site of Special Scientific Interest’, therefore with strict restrictions on what can be grown. In addition to these native plants already around the cottage or transplanted from the roadside or from the shingle beach, Jarman included plants that, though not native, have been introduced long ago and now grew wild, such as Rest-harrow (Ononis repens), Valerian (Centrathus ruber), foxglove, horned poppy (Claucium flavum) and dog rose (Rosa canina).11 There are also vanished native plants that have been brought back such as ‘fennel and the stinking hawksbeard that has been reintroduced by the ecology department of Sussex University’.12 In addition, Jarman purchased plants in nurseries on the drive to Dungeness from London. Jarman also introduced a raised herb and vegetable garden with ‘thyme and oregano, hyssop, lavender, rue, fennel and rosemary, caraway, artemisia, pinks, a few sweet peas, night-scented stock, rows of lamb’s tongue, purslane, peas, radish, onion, lettuce, spinach and purple rocket’.13 Graded topsoil was brought in for these vegetables and herbs, as well as manure, dug down under the shingle, for the other plants. A bee-hive was introduced between the raised beds of vegetables and herbs. Jarman used selective pest-killers: ‘Oh, those pesky browntail moths are munching again. I’m going to go to war. I expect they’re highly protected but I’m going to shut my eyes to the slaughter. They’re killing the prostrate blackthorn which is rarer than they are in these parts.’14 In this respect, Derek Jarman writes that ‘my garden is ecologically sound, though work of any kind disrupts the existing terrain.’15 Derek Jarman’s statement about Dungeness agrees with Peter Youngman’s analysis that ‘prized species-rich vegetation is a man-made phenomenon and needs management to maintain it; that ecological disturbance does not necessarily involve ecological destruction.’16 Yet nuclear power stations also attract new forms of life. The nuclear power station at Sizewell, for example,‘is providing nesting places and food supplies for a large variety of birds: kestrels and black redstarts, as well as the more common and to be expected species, nesting in the buildings; cormorants on the offshore cooling water structures; twenty different species feeding at and around the sewage works; and many others feeding and nesting in the natural vegetation that has grown up during the past ten years on the extensive areas excavated and filled’.17 Similarly, Derek Jarman’s garden treads a cautious path between management, disturbance, destruction and conservation: by (artificially) controlling certain features to prevent the inevitable (natural) destruction of others. Derek Jarman’s garden is ecological precisely because it creates a ‘prized species-rich vegetation’.18 But, simultaneously, it goes against purist ecological principles by using chemicals as well as introducing non-native species and even non-native soils. This garden plays on the ambiguities, complexities and inherent contradictions of the ecological position. Jarman, for example, bought one plant in a nurserythrift-that already grows wild on the other side of Dungeness, and this plant is now growing so well that it is seeding itself this side of Dungeness. We find identical complexities, ambiguities and contradictions when it comes to the architecture of the cottage which the garden surrounds. Prospect Cottage is a fisherman’s clapboard cottage, painted with black pitch, similar to all the other cottages that line the road along Dungeness. It is not only a vernacular building, but a vernacular building of the most ordinary kind. The roof is corrugated metal. This is not spectacular, memorable or heroic vernacular architecture, but vernacular architecture defined as the cheapest form of DIY. It has all the qualities of a found object. And yet, already in its cheap found DIY form, it had one unusual feature: bright yellow door-frames and window-frames. This feature has been retained: ‘The windows are painted the cheery yellow that they were when we found it.’19 Following tradition, the house regularly gets re-tarred to withstand the weather. In some ways, the original condition of the house has been restored since ‘stripping carpets and plasterboard revealed the wooden rooms’.20 But in many other ways, the
house has been altered by the building of an extension behind and by the replacement of the front-door and of the windows by ‘old-fashioned windows’21 with small window-panes, so called ‘Georgian’ windows, available in DIY supermarkets. So, like its surrounding garden, Prospect Cottage is a blend of native features, of found non-native features and of designer features. Like the ambiguities, complexities and contradictions of the ecological garden which blends natural with artificial, Prospect Cottage too blends original vernacular, naturalised vernacular and architectural design. The very symbol of this is the yellow door-frames and window-frames. At Sizewell nuclear station, a similar proposal was made to use yellow paint: ‘… the main colour to be used [at Sizewell] is blue… There also remains a curious proposal to paint the permanent beach gantry a vivid yellow, an unfortunate little sneer at Suffolk’s gentle hues.’22 So the yellow colour of Prospect Cottage is both natural (since it was found there) and unnatural (since it goes against the landscape hues of southern England), both a feature of a found vernacular building and of a ‘designer’ object. Even the very ‘finding’ of Prospect Cottage is built on ambiguity, complexity and contradiction. Prospect Cottage was found by Derek Jarman who already knew that it was there to be found:
I had noticed the little fisherman’s cottage, with its black varnish and yellow windows, before, when I was in Dungeness making two images in The Last of England. I had been struck by the area’s otherworldly atmosphere-unlike any other place I had ever seen-and the extraordinary light.23
