Diarist of the reinvented self: Derek Jarman on gardening, filmmaking, queer activism and living with Aids

When I first saw a picture of the fisherman’s cottage at Dungeness on the Kent coast, with a power plant luminous and eerie in the background, I could not understand what I was looking at, nor decipher the immediate appeal. The tar-black shingled and poster-yellow cottage, the so-called garden with sculptures of rusting iron garden implements set among dragons’ teeth of shale and flint, the salt-blasted dog-roses and tiny battling annuals and succulents astounded me. This was Prospect Cottage, the last home of the queer activist and film-maker Derek Jarman, and after looking at a single photograph of his garden I was a changed gardener myself, an anti-aesthete of a new order.

The diaries chronicling Derek Jarman’s battle against Aids in Thatcher’s England include Modern Nature (1991), At Your Own Risk (1992) and Smiling in Slow Motion (2000). They are anything but bleak for the most part: feisty, humorous, opinionated, cultured and political. Scathing about the media and the apathy around Aids treatment and research in the 1980s, Jarman is provocative but never dull and his daily life embraces the uncensored and conflicted and pleasurable and terrifying in equal measure. Qualmless cruising for sex on Hampstead Heath. Joyful domestic devotion with his lover and caretaker Keith Collins, The continuing creativity around the making of his avantgarde film Wittgenstein. The bliss of gardening against the odds. He was a protean and unforgettable, challenging artist, unafraid of controversy and detesting the stuffed shirts of his time, always something of a bomb-throwing radical but also liberated enough to pause and smell the roses. The last diaries are poignant, heartbreaking, hard to read. His deep loyalty and love for his friends was fully reciprocated and he changed a certain nostagic complacency inherent in the notion of English gardens. Not a small triumph.

…Maggie Hambling, who good-naturedly complained I had not said hello. I had, though maybe not immediately. Maggie is a tonic at any of these receptions. ‘What are you up to?’ I described the garden and Dungeness.

‘Oh,’ said Maggie ‘you’ve discovered nature Derek.’

‘Well it’s not quite that, Maggie, it’s not Samuel Palmer’s Kent.’

‘Oh I see,’ she said ‘you’ve discovered modern nature.’

Modern Nature