How to garden at the end of the world

Prospect Cottage and — in the background — a nuclear powerplant. (All photos by Howard Sooley, unless otherwise noted).

On February 28th, 1989, Derek Jarman left his cottage and, like many days, strolled along the shingle of Dungeness, a vast, windswept expanse of rocky beach on the southeast edge of England.¹ The desolate landscape is punctuated only by a string of black fishermen’s cottages, a lifeboat station, a pub, and — looming over the rest — a nuclear power plant. The shingle is as beautiful as it is bleak, stretching towards the horizon as it dissolves into the sparkling azure sea and clear blue sky. Walking along the beach, Jarman gathered stones for the garden that he had been gradually creating, curating, and tending since he bought Prospect Cottage two years prior.²

The stones he collected on February 28th were — like driftwood, metal buoys, smashed bottles, rusty metal, china plates, and oblong flints — carried home and added to his garden, which was “built for dear friends Howard, Paul, Terence, David, Robert, and Ken, / And many others, each stone has a life to tell.”³ The stories of his friends who passed away due to complications of AIDS are told not only by the stones in his garden but also in Jarman’s journals, which were first published as Modern Nature (January 1989 – September 1990) and Smiling in Slow Motion (May 1991 – January 1994). In his kaleidoscopic, sensitive prose, Jarman weaves together the unpredictable progression of his own illness, searing commentary on the history of English gardening, vulnerable reflections on a fraught childhood, and — perhaps above all else — a tender, patient attention to the minutiae of his garden.

[...]

In this essay, I want to unsettle the givenness of the world by orienting my theoretical attention towards how possible practices of worldmaking emerge from and through the necessary, inescapable relationship between grief and care. That is to say, I’m interested in the worldmaking that is made possible (and indeed demanded) by the ordinary affects circulating within the conditions of world-ending. To that end, this essay proceeds as “an experiment, not a judgement,”⁴ attempting to trace the shifting and polyvalent contours of care and grief in Jarman’s journals, films, and painting vis-à-vis his garden as a site and act of worldmaking. I begin by exploring the role of gardens in Jarman’s childhood to demonstrate how the erotic is entangled in a metonymic relay between one’s body and one’s world. Furthermore, I show how these early experiences of erotic encounter are intimately linked to moments of death, pain, grief. Then, I return to Prospect Cottage to flesh out how illness changes the slippage between self and soil and renders the body — and by extension the world — unrecognizable. Finally, I return to the ordinary acts of care at the heart of Jarman’s journals and gardening practice.

Photo from Jarman, Derek. Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013.

Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 24.
Tony Peake, Derek Jarman: A Biography (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 394.
Jarman, Modern Nature, 178.
Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 1.

Lost and Guided