WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY OLIVIA LAING
In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness.
Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living.
Derek Jarman’s creativity spanned decades and genres – painter, theatre designer, director, film maker, writer and gardener.
From his first one-man show at the Lisson Gallery in 1969; set designs and costumes for the theatre and ballet (Jazz Calendar with Frederick Ashton at Covent Garden, Don Giovanni with John Gielgud at the London Coliseum, The Rake’s Progress with Ken Russell at Teatro Communale, Florence); production design for Ken Russell’s films The Devils and Savage Messiah; through his own films in super-8 before working on features: Sebastine (1976), Jubilee (1978), The Tempest (1979), The Angelic Conversation (1985), Caravaggio (1986), The Last of England (1987), War Requiem (1989), The Garden (1990), Edward II (1991), Wittgenstein (1993), and Blue (1993); to directing pop-videos and live performances for Pet Shop Boys and Suede.
His paintings – for which he was a Turner Prize nominee in 1986 – have been exhibited world-wide.
His garden surrounding the fisherman’s cottage in Dungeness where he spent the last years of his life remains a site of awe and pilgrimage to fans and newcomers to Jarman’s singular vision.
His publications include: Dancing Ledge (1984), Kicking the Pricks (1987), Modern Nature (1991), At Your Own Risk (1992), Chroma (1994), Derek Jarman’s Garden (1995).
ALSO BY DEREK JARMAN
Dancing Ledge
Derek Jarman’s Garden
Smiling in Slow Motion
Chroma
At Your Own Risk
Kicking the Pricks
There is no book I love more than Modern Nature. There’s nothing I’ve read so often, or that has shaped me so deeply. I first came to it a year or two after its publication in 1991, certainly before Derek Jarman’s death in 1994. It was my sister Kitty who introduced me to his work. She was ten or eleven then and I was twelve, maybe thirteen.
Strange kids. My mother was gay, and the three of us lived on an ugly new development in a village near Portsmouth, where all the culs-de-sac were named after the fields they’d destroyed. We were happy enough together, but the world outside felt flimsy, inhospitable, permanently grey. I hated my girls’ school, with its homophobic pupils and prying teachers, perpetually curious about the ‘family situation’. This was the era of Section 28, which banned local authorities from promoting homosexuality and schools from teaching its acceptability ‘as a pretended family relationship’. Designated by the state as a pretend family, we lived under its malign rule, its imprecation of exposure and imminent disaster.
I can’t remember now how Derek first entered our world. A late night Channel 4 screening of Edward II? Kitty was immediately obsessed. For years she’d watch and rewatch his films in her room late at night, Jarman’s most unlikely and fervent fan, bewitched in particular by the scene of Gaveston and Edward dancing together in their prison, two boys in pyjamas moving together to the sound of Annie Lennox singing ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’.
It was the books that did it for me. I fell for Modern Nature at once. Returning to it this winter I was astounded to see how thoroughly my adult life was founded in its pages. It was here I developed a sense of what it meant to be an artist, to be political, even how to plant a garden (playfully, stubbornly, ignoring boundaries, collaborating freely).
I became a herbalist in my twenties under its lingering spell, charmed by the endless litanies of plant names – woody nightshade, hawkweed, restharrow – interspersed with fragments from old herbals, Apulius and Gerard on the properties of the sorcerer’s violet and the arum lily. When I came to write my first book, To the River, it was Jarman’s voice I sought to channel.
In the early 1990s, Derek was always in the paper or on the radio. He was one of the only well-known people in Britain to make his HIV status public, and so he became a kind of figurehead. ‘I’ve always hated secrets,’ he explained of his decision, ‘the canker that destroys.’ He was vocally incensed by the prejudice, the censorship, the lack of research and funds, but he was also charming, witty and full of mischief.
He feared the announcement would threaten the viability of his future as a filmmaker, since he could no longer be insured. He knew too that he’d be the subject of tabloid hate, a visible target for AIDS panic. It wasn’t paranoia. In his 2017 diary for the London Review of Books, Alan Bennett recalled sitting behind Jarman at the 1992 premiere of Angels in America. He’d slightly grazed his hand on the way to the theatre and was ‘desperate lest Jarman turn round and shake hands. So I shamefully kept mum.’ In the interval he raced upstairs and got a plaster, after which he felt able to say hello. Bennett relayed the story, he explained, ‘as a reminder of the hysteria of the time, to which I was not immune.’
It’s hard to express how bleak and frightening those years were. There was no internet, that addictive mutation of Dr Dee’s magical mirror. You knew so little. Even sick, Derek was a testament, blazing, blatant, to possibility. We looked at him and knew there was another kind of life: wild, riotous, jolly. He opened a door and showed us paradise. He’d planted it himself, ingenious and thrifty. I don’t believe in model lives, but even now, a quarter century on, I ask myself, what would Derek do?
~
Derek Jarman began the diary that became Modern Nature on 1 January 1989 by describing Prospect Cottage, the tiny pitch-black fisherman’s house on Dungeness beach he’d bought on impulse for £32,000, using an inheritance from his father. After decades in London, he finally had the opportunity to return to his first love, gardening.
At first glance, Dungeness was hardly a promising location for a besotted plantsman. Nicknamed the ‘fifth quarter’, it was a place unlike anywhere else, a microclimate of extremes, plagued by drought, gales and leaf-scorching salt. In this stony desert, overlooked by a looming nuclear power station, Jarman set about conjuring an unlikely oasis. Like all his projects, it was done by hand and on a shoestring budget. Hauling manure, digging holes in the shingle, he cajoled old roses and fig trees into bloom with the same irrepressible charm he applied to actors.
In its early pages, Modern Nature reads not unlike Gilbert White or Dorothy Wordsworth, a scholarly account of local flora and fauna mixed with scraps of antiquarian lore. Jarman had a painter’s facility for capturing the shifting tones of sea, sky and stone, and his sharp eyes were busy ferreting out unlikely abundance on the beach. Horned poppy and sea kale grew from the shingle; there were bluebells, mullein, viper’s bugloss, broom, gorse, lizards and dozens of different types of butterflies.
But as he explained to the painter Maggi Hambling, his interests did not entirely square with those of a stately Victorian naturalist. ‘Ah, I understand completely,’ she replied. ‘You’ve discovered modern nature.’ The definition was ideal, encompassing both reeling nights cruising on Hampstead Heath and the waking nightmare of HIV infection. His capacity to write honestly about sex and death – self-evidently the most natural of states – makes much contemporary nature writing seem prissy and anaemic. Derek still seems to me the best as well as most radical nature writer, because he refuses to exclude the body from his sphere of interest, documenting the rising tides of sickness and desire with as much care and attention as he does the discovery of sea buckthorn or a wild fig.
Building a garden was Jarman’s characteristically energetic, fruitful response to the despair of what was, pre-combination therapy, a near-certain death sentence. It was a stake in the future, and it also led him deep into remembrance of the past. As he reacquainted himself with the plants he’d doted on as a boy – forget-me-not, sempervivum, clove-scented gilly flower – he was cast back to the gardens of his own peripatetic and unhappy childhood.
His father was an RAF pilot, and the family moved often. As a child Jarman had lived in sprawling splendour on the banks of Lake Maggiore in Italy, in Pakistan and Rome. While billeted in Somerset, a wall of the house gave way under a tidal wave of honey, made by wild bees that had congregated in the attic.
A sensitive child, Derek found in gardens a zone of magic and possibility, a ripe alternative to the violent regimentation of military life. He remembered building nests from grass clippings and poring over the luxuriant coloured plates of Beautiful Flowers and How to Grow Them on rainy days. His father bandied floral insults: pansy, lemon; once, or so a relative said, he threw his small son through a window.
A garden, especially a neglected garden, was also powerfully erotic. At prep school, miserably adrift, temperamentally unsuited to the code of muscular Christianity, Derek had his first sexual experiences with another lost boy, licking and caressing in muddy ecstasy in a glade of violets. The lovely feeling, the boy called it. Inevitably they were discovered, the first and most agonising experience of being cast from Eden, a trauma he replicated in film after film.
School. He called it Paradise Perverted: beatings in place of embraces, the miserable little boys in their poorly fitting suits torturing each other, starved of affection, estranged from their bodies. He carried with him into early adulthood a corrosive sense of shame, an inability to speak of, let alone act upon, his real desires. ‘Frightened and confused, I felt I was the only queer in the world.’
Modern Nature is suffused with regret for this wasted time, the strangulated years before Jarman finally gathered the resolve to come out at art school and begin – joy of joys – having sex with men, that still illicit act, the paradise regained of reciprocated desire.
~
The classical education Jarman received marked him in more benign ways, too. It’s plain even in the changeable weather of a diary that he oscillates continually between two selves, the rebel and the antiquarian. There’s the wicked scourge of the system, yes, the queer experimenter who delights in making Mary Whitehouse wince. But there’s also the traditionalist who doesn’t possess a credit card and hides the fax machine in a laundry basket, who grieves the loss of rites and structures, the teeming vegetable gardens of Kent made obsolete by supermarkets, the Elizabethan bear pit in Bankside torn down by developers.
Jarman is not exactly nostalgic here, and certainly not in the Little England sense. He was against walls and fences; for conversation, collaboration, exchange. As he says on the very first page: ‘My garden’s boundaries are the horizon.’ What enraptured him was a heraldic, romantic, maybe half-imaginary England. ‘The Middle Ages have formed the paradise of my imagination,’ he writes dreamily, ‘not William Morris’s journeyman Eden but something subterranean, like the seaweed and coral that floats in the arcades of a jewelled reliquary.’
As a student at King’s College London in the 1960s he’d been taught by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, whose knowledgeable eye could detect the multiple timeframes at play in every haphazard English city or country scene. To Jarman there were times when it seemed the past ran very close, almost touchable – a feeling he shared with Virginia Woolf and which he made manifest in films like Jubilee and The Angelic Conversation, his time-travelling enchantments.
England’s losses were melancholy. The sharper blade was AIDS. Jarman’s diary is punctuated by death, the premature and cataclysmic loss of so many of his friends. ‘Old age came quickly for my frosted generation,’ he writes grievingly, and dreams often of the dead. On Thursday 13 April 1989, he records a phone conversation with his beloved Howard Brookner, the brilliant young New York film-maker. Brookner had by then lost the power of speech and for 20 minutes communicated by way of a ‘low wounded moaning’, a devastation magnified by the technological wizardry that couldn’t cure him but sent his voice speeding halfway round the earth.
AIDS contributed too to a sense of impending apocalypse. Faced daily by the baleful spectacle of the power station Dungeness B, which one day appeared to explode in a cloud of steam, Jarman fretted over global warming, the greenhouse effect, the hole in the ozone layer. Would there be a future? Was the past irreparably destroyed? What to do? Don’t waste time. Plant rosemary, red-hot poker, santolina; alchemise terror into art.
~
But wait! I don’t want to neglect the other Derek, the mischief-maker, chatty and irrepressible as his neighbour’s thieving crow, flirting in Comptons bar, gossiping and plotting over cakes from Maison Bertaux. He steals cuttings from every plant he sees, fulminates against tabloid editors, the National Trust, ticket machines and Channel 4 controllers and then concludes disarmingly by revelling in his own good fortune, his late-flowering joy.
‘HB, love’, a hospital scrawl. The deepest source of his happiness was the Hinney Beast, the nickname he bestowed on his companion, Keith Collins. Extraordinarily beautiful, Collins was a computer programmer from Newcastle. They met at a screening in 1987 and by the time the diary began were living and working together, shuttling between Prospect Cottage and Phoenix House, Jarman’s tiny studio on Charing Cross Road.
‘I’m an old colonel and he’s a young subaltern’, Jarman told the Independent in 1993, for their ‘How We Met’ column, to which HB replied: ‘Our relationship is very unusual – we’re not lovers or boyfriends. I tell you what we’re like: James Fox and Dirk Bogarde in The Servant. I’m always saying things like: ‘If I may be so bold, sir, my quiche comes highly recommended.’
Shadow-boxing, popping out of cars like a jack-in-the-box, taking three-hour baths, in which he balanced bowls of corn flakes and prayed with his head under water, HB is a vivid presence in Modern Nature. He teases and soothes Jarman, cooks his supper, acts luminously in the films and makes even the editing suite run smoothly.
Film was a more intransigent beloved. ‘I had foolishly wished film to be home, to contain all the intimacies,’ Jarman writes, but bringing his vision into the world required endless compromise and frustration. It was the giddy delight of the shoot he loved, the improvised, gorgeously costumed chaos, flying by the seat of his boiler suit, restaging images snatched from dreams.
The contemplative periods at Prospect Cottage were increasingly interrupted by a whirlwind of projects, as he attempted to squeeze decades of work into a handful of years. In the two years covered by the diary, Jarman made The Garden and the films for the Pet Shop Boys’ first tour, which he also designed, as well as beginning work on Edward II and painting sometimes five canvases a day. There was so little time, so many ideas to make material.
All this activity came to an abrupt halt in the spring of 1990, when he found himself on the Victoria Ward of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, battling tuberculosis of the liver while the Poll Tax riots raged outside. His hospital diaries are extraordinary for their ongoing cheer, despite what was plainly agony and terror. Dressed in ‘Prussian blue and carmine jimjams,’ he logged the torments of sight loss and drenching night sweats with curiosity and good humour. Returned to a state of absolute physical dependency, flooded by memories of his own unhappy infancy, he discovered to his abiding joy that he was surrounded by love.
~
The diary ends in hospital, the opening litanies of plant names replaced by those of the drugs that were keeping him alive. AZT, Ritafer, Sulfadiazine, Carbamazepine, the grim lullaby of the early 1990s. But Jarman would rise from his hospital bed and go on to make Edward II, Wittgenstein and Blue, his magisterial late films. He crammed much more than seems possible into the next four years, before dying at the age of 52.
I wish he’d had longer. I wish he was still here, buoyant and fizzing, cooking up something out of practically nothing. The range and scale of his work is dizzying: eleven feature films, each pushing the bounds of cinema, from Sebastiane’s Latin to Blue’s unchanging screen; ten books; dozens of Super 8 shorts and music videos; hundreds of paintings; set designs for Frederick Ashton’s Jazz Calendar, John Gielgud’s Don Giovanni, and Ken Russell’s Savage Messiah and The Devils; not to mention the iconic garden.
There’s no one like him now. The other day I read a tweet from a journalist defending those who write for publications like the Daily Mail by saying: ‘Journalism is a dying industry and writers need to pay their rent. We’re certainly not rich enough to choose our morals over the need to survive.’
I could imagine Derek laughing at that. His whole life was a refutation of such shabby logic. Imagine thinking morals are a luxury for the super-rich! He saw film as a dying industry and all the same he kept on making them, not waiting for funding or permission but picking up a Super 8 and assembling a cast of friends. When he and the designer Christopher Hobbs needed a set in Caravaggio to look like Vatican marble, they painted a concrete floor black and flooded it with water – an illusion of plenitude that was somehow plenitude in its own right, because of its imaginative richness, a richness comprised not of hard cash, but of resourcefulness and effort. His entire fee for War Requiem was £10. He had enough to eat, what else was there to do but the work he loved? On always to the next thing. ‘The filming, not the film.’
Here’s another line that has stayed with me for more than twenty years. It’s from Modern Nature, and recurs in Chroma and Blue (Derek was an inveterate recycler of favourite shots and lines). It’s borrowed loosely from ‘The Song of Solomon’, a more gentle relic of the Christianity that had made his childhood so bitterly unhappy.
For our time is the passing of a shadow
And our lives will run like
Sparks through the stubble.
It’s how we all go, in and out of the dark, but oh, to have given off such a blaze.
Olivia Laing, 2018
Prospect Cottage, its timbers black with pitch, stands on the shingle at Dungeness. Built eighty years ago at the sea’s edge – one stormy night many years ago waves roared up to the front door threatening to swallow it … Now the sea has retreated leaving bands of shingle. You can see these clearly from the air; they fan out from the lighthouse at the tip of the Ness like contours on a map.
Prospect faces the rising sun across a road sparkling silver with sea mist. One small clump of dark green broom breaks through the flat ochre shingle. Beyond, at the sea’s edge, are silhouetted a jumble of huts and fishing boats, and a brick kutch, long abandoned, which has sunk like a pillbox at a crazy angle; in it, many years ago, the fishermen’s nets were boiled in amber preservative.
There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon. In this desolate landscape the silence is only broken by the wind, and the gulls squabbling round the fishermen bringing in the afternoon catch.
There is more sunlight here than anywhere in Britain; this and the constant wind turn the shingle into a stony desert where only the toughest grasses take a hold – paving the way for sage-green sea kale, blue bugloss, red poppy, yellow sedum.
The shingle is home to larks. In the spring I’ve counted as many as a dozen singing high above, lost in a blue sky. Flocks of greenfinches wheel past in spirals, caught in a scurrying breeze. At low tide the sea rolls back to reveal a wide sandbank, on which seabirds vanish like quicksilver as they fly close to the ground. Gulls feed alongside fishermen digging lug. When a winter storm blows up, cormorants skim the waves that roar along the Ness – throwing stones pell-mell along the steep bank.
The view from my kitchen at the back of the house is bounded to the left by the old Dungeness lighthouse, and the iron grey bulk of the nuclear reactor – in front of which dark green broom and gorse, bright with yellow flowers, have formed little islands in the shingle, ending in a scrubby copse of sallow and ash dwarfed and blasted by the gales.
In the middle of the copse is a barren pear tree that has struggled for a century to reach ten feet; underneath this a carpet of violets. Gnarled dog roses guard this secret spot – where on a calm summer day meadow browns and blues congregate in their hundreds, floating past the spires of nettles thick with black tortoiseshell caterpillars.
High above a lone hawk hovers, while far away on the blue horizon the tall medieval tower of Lydd church, the cathedral of the marshes, comes and goes in a heat haze.
~
A sky blue borage plant in flower, one of a clump that self-seeded by the back door. It droops in the early morning frost but recovers quickly: ‘I borage bring courage.’
The first crocus is out in the front garden, one of the corms I planted last year in little pockets of peat in the shingle. It struggled to open all morning, finally drawing the sunlight to itself as the sun disappeared behind the house.
Planted roses: Rugosa double de Coubert Harrisonii, Rosa mundi – a selection of old roses from Rassell’s in Earls Court. By the time I have finished there will be over thirty scattered in clumps through the garden, disrupting its wildness as little as possible.
I arrived at dusk in the nursery set in its little square under the plane trees – it’s a romantic place. Walking around in the deepening gloom through the rows of plants you are drawn into dreams of long summer days, looking at the ageing photos above each plant. Rosa mundi, rose of the world, with its crimson and blush striped flowers, an old sport from the apothecary’s Rose officionalis the rose of Provins. It was brought back by a 12th century crusader and immortalised by Guillaume de Lorris in his poem the Roman de La Rose. When I took my roses to pay for them I found my old friend André manning the till. He laughed at the idea of my wilderness garden.
The second of my small holly bushes has been devoured by a voracious rabbit that has gnawed clean through the stem to get at leaves out of reach. I trimmed back the little that remained. Last year, transplanted from its cosy inland bed, it lost all its leaves to a freezing easterly; the blackened remains slowly came back to life.
These hollies were the first plants I nurtured – in large tubs sunk into the stones. I was encouraged by the fact that they grow on the other side of the Ness at Holmstone.
Blasted by the winds into frightful shapes, these ancient trees are first mentioned by Leland in his Itineraries; there he says ‘they bat fowl and kill manye birds’.
Continued my rose planting: Rosa Foetida bicolor, another old rose, grown in the Middle East since the twelfth century, with single flowers – bright yellow and red; and Cantabrigiensis, pale yellow, found in the 1930s in the botanic gardens at Cambridge.
A brilliant sunny day, as the greenhouse effect takes hold, winter evaporates.
At twelve a load of manure arrived from the local stables. As I shovelled it I realised how unfit I was, I had great difficulty keeping up with the cheerful Glaswegian farmer, who must have been in his mid-sixties. Without a wheelbarrow, I had to pull heavy sacks all day to transport even a third of the load around the garden. The cost of the manure was £24, the whole enterprise – manure and roses – has cost about £200, and has filled me with happiness. By tea time I ached so much I thought it was time to give up. At 4:30 the sun sank behind the nuclear power station.
~
On either side of the front door are two neat flower beds each twelve feet long, and two feet six inches wide; they were filled with old blocks of concrete and broken bricks which I carefully extracted and used to reinforce the foundations of the drive. Cars sink easily in the shingle and have to be towed out.
At low tide I collect large oblong flints which are uncovered by a good storm and plant them upright like dragon’s teeth in the beds. In front of them two small circles of twelve stones each form a primitive sundial. In spite of the dry summers these flower beds thrive. A little mulching helps.
Amongst the plants which grow in them are houseleeks and sedums, thrift, dianthus, saxifrage, campion, wallflower, purple iris, calendula, curry plant, rue, camomile, columbine, shirley poppy, santolina and nasturtium – and night scented stock to fill the evenings with its heavenly scent, attracting moths to drink its nectar.
Cut a strong shoot from the base of one of the elder bushes by the Long Pits, under a chalky moon at dusk; planted it straight in front of the kitchen window next to the burnet rose.
I took a similar cutting last March and planted it right against the kitchen wall; it shot up and ended the summer over two foot high.
On the Ness, elder forms compact pyramidal bushes about nine feet high; there are four or five of them within a mile; they are easily burnt by the salt spray but apart from that seem happy; they are very advanced this year, the buds are breaking.
Elder keeps the witches at bay, and if grown near the house should never be uprooted.
My 47th birthday.
The sea mist cleared leaving a bright sunny day. As I walked round the garden a lark was singing. In front of the house the crocuses are blooming and the daffodils are in bud. The roses are already breaking into leaf. One of the rosemary bushes is in flower, and the globular seeds of the sea kale have germinated.
I spent an hour after lunch sitting in the sun with only a pullover – something I have never done on my birthday, which has always been a cold, grey day.
~
Planted a handful of sea kale seedlings about the garden, they grow rapidly, making luxurious plants within the year; large grey-green leaves catch the summer dew like pearls; their perfection untouched by predatory caterpillars. They fringe the sea, their frilly leaves dance a Can-Can amongst the flotsam. At this time of the year they are nearly invisible, but if you look closely they are already sprouting their sturdy purple leaves. By April they will have turned a glaucous green, which in turn will be submerged in June by a froth of white flowers.
Flowers spring up and entwine themselves like bindweed along the foot-paths of my childhood. Most loved were the blue stars of wild forget-me-nots that shimmered in the dark Edwardian shrubberies of my grandmother’s garden. Pristine snowdrops spread out in the welcoming sun – a single crocus, purple among its golden companions. Wild columbine with its flowers shaped like vertebrae, and the ominous fritillaria that crouched snakelike in corners …
These spring flowers are my first memory, startling discoveries; they shimmered briefly before dying, dividing the enchantment into days and months, like the gong that summoned us to lunch, breaking up my solitude.
The gong brought the pressing necessity of that other world into the garden where I was alone. In that precious time I would stand and watch the garden grow, something imperceptible to my friends. There, in my dreaming, petals would open and close, a rose suddenly fall apart scattering itself across the path, or a tulip lose a single petal, its perfection shattered for ever.
Dusty ivy, spooky with cobwebs – nettles which sprang up with the summer to sting bare knees – I learned to skirt round the deadly nightshade, to view it with grudging respect. But of all plants, dandelions, which bled white when you picked them, filled me with most fear.
But Gran’s garden, in spite of its shadows, was a place of sunlight; no longer cultivated, its herbaceous borders long since softened by invading daisies and buttercups, it was slowly returning to the wild.
The gorse is a blaze of golden flowers forced by the wind into an agony of weird shapes, twisted branches wrung out like washing. It’s the only winter flower on the Ness; some of the bushes are six feet high, crowned with tight bunches of spines which creak in the wind. Other bushes cling to the ground, shaped in neat cones and pyramids which are clipped by the rabbits with the precision of topiary. ‘Kissing is out of season when gorse is out of bloom.’ noone need worry – here it is always in flower.
For two months after moving here I spent hours each day picking up fragments of countless smashed bottles, china plates, pieces of rusty metal. There was a bike, cooking pots, even an old bedstead. Rubbish had been scattered over the whole landscape. Each day I thought I had got to the end of the task only to find the shingle had thrown up another crop overnight.
Sunny days were the best for clearing up, as the glass and pottery glinted. I buried the lot on the site of an old bonfire at the bottom of the garden in a large mound, which I covered with the clumps of grass I dug out when I built the shingle garden.
~
I was describing the garden to Maggi Hambling at a gallery opening. And said I intended to write a book about it.
She said: ‘Oh, you’ve finally discovered nature, Derek.’
‘I don’t think it’s really quite like that,’ I said, thinking of Constable and Samuel Palmer’s Kent.
‘Ah, I understand completely. You’ve discovered modern nature.’
~
In July my bank bloomed with two distinct wild poppies – the long headed poppy, P. dubium, and the field poppy, P. rhoeas. I carefully gathered the seed heads and raked the mound – as poppies like to grow in newly disturbed soil. The rest of the seed is scattered far and wide … Some of the seedlings are already two inches across, but the slugs seem particularly fond of them and continually crop them; they survive though, and are soon sprouting again.
I filmed last year’s poppies with a bee hovering over them and put the shot into War Requiem. Poppies have sprung up in many of my films: Imagining October, Caravaggio, The Last Of England and War Requiem.
Scarlet Poppies
This is a poppy
A flower of cornfield and wasteland
Bloody red
Sepals two
Soon falling
Petals four
Stamens many
Stigma rayed Many seeded
For sprinkling on bread
The staff of life
Woven in wreaths
In memory of the dead
Bringer of dreams
And sweet forgetfulness
A fine sunny day with a bank of cloud which advanced and retreated more than once over the Ness. By three the tide was out and I walked for an hour across the sands to Jack’s store to buy cigarettes. On the way I passed two oiled guillemots, one already dead, the other quite motionless. There are dead or dying birds along the shore almost every day. I hadn’t the heart to kill it; tomorrow of course it will be dead, picked to pieces by the carrion crows which strut about amongst the seagulls, waiting for the end.
Back home I lit a cigarette and wandered into the garden – where to my surprise the rosemary was now covered in flowers.
~
Last year the icy February winds cut back my plants – by April they were blackened and bedraggled; but the summer revived them and they grew into strong healthy bushes about a foot high. Rosemary – Ros marinus, sea dew – has proved quite hardy here. My next door neighbour has an ancient gnarled specimen – all the garden books are emphatic it hates the wind, but a more windy and exposed spot you could not find. Thomas More, who loved it, wrote, ‘As for Rosemarie, I let it run all over my garden walls, not because bees love it but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance and therefore to friendship, whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language.’
The herb was part of Ophelia’s bouquet: ‘here’s rosemary for remembrance.’ Gilded and tied with ribbons it was carried at weddings; also, a sprig of it was placed in the hands of the dead.
Legend has it that originally its flowers were white until the day the Virgin Mary laid out her robe to dry on some bushes, colouring them a heavenly blue.
‘Where rosemary flourishes women rule’: years ago on the island of Patmos, the old woman on whose roof I was sleeping washed my clothes for me, and scented them with wild rosemary from the hillside. In ancient Greece young men wore garlands of rosemary in their hair to stimulate the mind; perhaps the gathering of the Symposium was scented with it.
In 1946 we flew to Italy, where my father after some months became Commandant of the airfield in Rome, and a witness in the Venice war trials. Villa Zuassa was requisitioned for us – a large house on Lake Maggiore, with extensive gardens on the lakeside.
Beautiful Flowers And How To Grow Them – a few months after my fourth birthday my parents gave me this large Edwardian garden book full of delightful watercolour illustrations and neat little line drawings: ‘Tea roses, chimney campanulas and snapdragons’ by Hugh Norris; and Francis James’ ‘Chinese primulas’ are my favourites, they held me spellbound on many a rainy day. Where my parents found this book, or why they gave it to me, with its carefully inscribed dedication, I cannot imagine. I certainly couldn’t read it; and even if I had I don’t know what I would have made of the long lists of acacias, acanthus and achilleas.
Perhaps my father found it in a dusty corner of some bookshop in Milan. Or perhaps my mother discovered the book in the house and gave it to me.
Beautiful Flowers was to be my bible for many years: I pored over its exotic pages, scribbled in coloured crayon across its illustrations and made my own first drawings of flowers by copying it.
Many years later I had one of the watercolours blown up to vast proportions for the backdrop of a short pas de deux set to Sibelius’ Nocturne: an enormous arch of blush pink orchids, which reduced the dancers to the size of fairies conjured so artfully in turn-of-the-century spirit photos.
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Beautiful Flowers opens with the rose. It is lavish in its praise: there should be nothing stiff, stilted or formal about roses, whether in the growing of them, the utilisation of them, or the writing about them – beauty begets beauty. Who can look on a picture of a beautiful garden without feeling the impulse to grow flowers, and what results this can have! A garden, where poor wayward humanity is capable of being swayed by emotions which make for peace and beauty. ‘Look to the rose’, it commands:
Look to the rose that blows about us,
Laughing, she says, into the world I blow,
At once the silken tassel of my purse
Tear, and its treasure on the garden throw …
So the Rubaiyat was the first poem I laid eyes on. Dunbar and the Bard himself followed quickly; there was no better path to poetry than this garden book.
My father filmed my mother picking the pink cabbage roses on my grandmother’s wall as they fell apart in her hands; and my sister and myself in the garden of Zuassa, standing in front of a bed of scarlet geraniums – ‘Zonal pelargoniums’ as my old book carefully reminds us.
Zonal pelargoniums! Geraniums remain for me geraniums. Beautiful Flowers describes them as ‘once the reigning Queen of the flower garden, the cheerful zonal has declined in favour’. But not with me: I have carefully nurtured them for years on my balcony in London, where they have bloomed continuously in the most adverse conditions.
Nowadays the plants come in the most ghastly colours and Paul Crampnet the true scarlet, the one and only colour of a geranium, is a rarity.
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True scarlet is a problem even in costuming films, and was the subject of many a conversation with Christopher Hobbs, designer on Caravaggio. ‘I cannot find a true scarlet,’ he lamented, holding up a small square of antique silk. ‘Where can you find that colour today?’
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The garden at Zuassa ran for a mile along the banks of Lake Maggiore. It spilled over its stone terraces – a cornucopia of cascading blossom, abandoned avenues of mighty camellias, old roses trailing into the lake, huge golden pumpkins, stone gods overturned and covered with scurrying green lizards, dark cypresses, and woods full of hazel and sweet chestnut.
Far away in a corner of the woods was a gatehouse where an old crone who lived in another time, pottered around vast trays, one above the other, and carried bundles of mulberry leaves to feed armies of voracious silk worms. In this Eden my sister and I walked arm-in-arm, naked, along a jetty submerged in the waters of the lake.
The weather was capricious: the sun quickly disappeared and thunderstorms descended from the mountains. Once a large glass door blew shut with such violence it shattered into a thousand pieces sending us all scurrying from the supper table. But the storm would soon be over; and these days remain in my memory full of sunlight. The dawn would bring Cecilia the housekeeper bustling into my bedroom – with a long feather duster to shoo out the swallows that flitted through the windows to build their nests in the corners of the room. Then she stood me on the bed and watched me dress, always re-tying my shoelaces neatly.
After breakfast Davide, her handsome eighteen year old nephew, would place me on the handlebars of his bike and we’d be off down country lanes – or out on to the lake in an old rowing boat, where I would watch him strip in the heat as he rowed round the headland to a secret cove, laughing all the way. He was my first love.
I counted well over 50 buds on the daffodils I planted last year. None are open yet, but if this warm weather continues they should be out within the week.
These are an early variety. The King Alfreds I put in early last September are hardly breaking through the ground.
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‘Daffodowndillies’ writes Thomas Hill ‘is a timely flower good for shew.’ Gerard in his Herbal tells us that ‘Theocritus affirmeth the daffodils to grow in meadowes … he writeth that the fair lady Europa, entering with her nymphs into the meadowes, did gather the sweet smelling daffodils, in these verses which we may English thus:
But when the girles here come into,
The meadowes flouring all in sight,
That wench with these, this wench with those,
Trim floures, themselves did all delight;
She with the Narcisse good in scent,
And she with Hyacynths content.’
Daffodil bulbs were used by Galen, surgeon of the school of gladiators, to glue together great wounds and gashes; the bulbs were carried for a similar purpose in the back-packs of Roman soldiers. Perhaps this is how they first came to this country. The name daffodil, d’asphodel, is a confusion with the asphodel. They were also called Lent lily.
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Daffodils ‘come before the swallows dare and take the winds of March with beauty’. When I read these words they are tinged with sadness, for the seasonal nature of daffodils has been destroyed by horticulturists who nowadays force them well before Christmas. One of the joys our technological civilisation has lost is the excitement with which seasonal flowers and fruits were welcomed; the first daffodil, strawberry or cherry are now things of the past, along with the precious moment of their arrival. Even the tangerine – now a satsuma or clementine – appears de-pipped months before Christmas. I expect one day to see daffodils for sale in Berwick Street market in August, as plentiful as strawberries at Christmas.
Even the humble apple has succumbed. Tough green waxy specimens have eradicated the varieties of my childhood, the pink-fleshed scented August pearmains, the laxtons and russets; only the cox seems to have survived the onslaught. Perhaps my nostalgia is out of place – now daffodils are plentiful; and mushrooms, once a luxury, are ladled out by the pound. Avocados and mangoes are commonplace. But the daffodil, if only the daffodil could come with spring again, I would eat strawberries with my Christmas pudding.
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The sun came out at four casting the longest shadows. I watched the shadow of Prospect Cottage as the sun set behind the nuclear power station, until the tip of the chimney touched the sea.
Power hums along the lines
to keep the fish and chips a-frying.
In the sunset
across the shingle
I hear a voice:
Will the owner of car HXJ please …
It’s been a quiet day.
I’ve brewed my nuclear tea, mended the walls to keep the storms at bay.
At nine-thirty the sun sets behind Lydd church;
The night stock scents the air.
At ten I switch the lantern on;
a bright pink moth shimmers on the pale blue wall.
I quickly turn the pages of my book:
Small Elephant Hawk.
The shingle heavy with dew sparkled in the dawn. A pale blue mist washes over the willows, the larks are up. Such a show of golden crocuses, a ladybird bathes in the pale blue borage – the pussy willow opens – later, in the cold of the day I walk back home across the shingle – a shimmering opalescent light. Vermeer dipped his brush in just such iridescent solitude.
The first rain in weeks and that rather listless, though driven by a strong breeze. It barely dampened the shingle – overnight one of the rosemary bushes has shed its leaves, the same that proved so tender last year. The crocuses blown in circles are full out, fighting an unequal battle with the gusts; beyond them the sea is running high, splashed with white horses. By noon the first of the daffodils opens, bowed almost to the ground by the inclement weather. We’ve prayed for a good fat rain (last night I watered the front garden), not this short change in the isobars.
There we lived in a flat requisitioned from Admiral Ciano, the uncle of Mussolini’s foreign secretary.
‘And he walked in the garden in the cool of the day,’ where he planted ‘every tree that is pleasant’. Each park dreams of Paradise; the word itself is Persian for garden. This particular shadow of Eden was originally the grounds of the villa that Scipione Borghese built for himself early in the seventeenth century. Here in the cool of a summer afternoon I rode the tough little donkeys through glades of acanthus, under old cedar trees to a water clock which kept time on a cascade of fern covered rocks.
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Time itself must have started in earnest after the Fall, because the seven days in which the world was created we now know was an eternity. The ancient Egyptians, whose lives were measured by the annual rise and fall of the Nile, were amongst the first to mark its passage systematically; the Borghese garden commemorates the Egyptians with a gateway in the form of twin pylons.
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In every corner the park mapped out Time’s History: its glades were strewn with monuments to mark its passing. Not the least of which was a circle of marble worthies put up at the end of the nineteenth century to celebrate the unification of Italy: a series of pasty po-faced poets, politicians, musicians, and engineers, who had paved the way for the modern state. Idiotically solemn, these dumb statues were always in danger of the graffiti brush – some had red noses; for me these were the most interesting.
What Scipione with his grand vision would have thought of all these worthies in the ruins of his Eden I cannot imagine. He strutted about in his cardinal’s scarlet and built a dynasty and his ostentatious polychrome villa: a vulgar gilded pleasure palace in the modern manner, filled with yet more antique marbles. A far cry from Adam’s wooden hut in Paradise, no doubt built from the timbers of the tree of knowledge – the very first house, which generations attempted to capture in a thousand garden houses, rustic summer houses and cottages ornées.
One day I returned home to our flat in via Paesiello for tea, to find that the seven days of the week were now mapped out by bells – and lessons at the American School.
Years later, in 1972, I returned to the Borghese gardens with a soldier I met in the Cinema Olympia. He had thrown his arms around me in the gods; later we made love under the stars of my Eden.
Sissinghurst, that elegant sodom in the garden of England, is ‘heritized’ in the institutional hands of the National Trust. Its magic has fled in the vacant eyes of tourists. If two boys kissed in the silver garden now, you can be sure they’d be shown the door. The shades of the Sackville-Wests pursuing naked guardsmen through the herbaceous borders return long after the last curious coachload has departed, the tea shoppe closed, and the general public has returned home to pore over the salacious Sundays, ferreting out another middle-aged victim driven into the not so secret arms of a boy starved of attention and affection who has spilt the beans for the illusory security of cash. ‘He pulled down the boy’s pants and blew him for £20 in the corridor of a cinema/a public lavatory/a deserted station, they met in a seedy club/Half Moon Street/the Dorchester.’
Two young men holding hands on the street court ridicule, kissing they court arrest, so the worthy politicians, their collaborators, the priests, and the general public push them into corners where they can betray them in the dark. Judases in the garden of Gethsemane.
Back home on a storm-tossed troop ship, from the marble halls of old Admiral Ciano’s house in Rome to a lead-grey Nissen hut near Cambridge – filled with thick suffocating coke fumes and running with a condensation that quickly covers our clothes with mildew.
Outside, my father inflates an old yellow dinghy: a makeshift swimming pool. It smells strongly of rubber and is quickly filled with large black water beetles, which appear as from the sky – perhaps from the huge branches of the walnut tree which casts its shadow across the lawn.
Autumn days spent throwing sticks into the tree and falling over backwards, hoping to bring down the hard little nuts in their green shells; until dizzy with fatigue we lie on our backs and watch the sky and tree revolve like a Catherine wheel.
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The garden at Cambridge consisted of the walnut tree and an uneven lawn from whose clippings I constructed grass forts, which rotted until the fermenting grass turned slippery. The garden was bounded by an old brick wall covered with caterpillars of the Large White, basking in the sunlight in various states of pupation.
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The yellow-green and black caterpillars remain a vivid memory. Last year, as the autumn came, the nasturtiums outside the window which I carefully nurtured here, were overwhelmed by an army of them. When the first frosts came, in October, they had eaten every leaf and flower.
to whom it may concern
in the dead stones of a planet
no longer remembered as earth
may he decipher this opaque hieroglyph
perform an archaeology of soul
on these precious fragments
all that remains of our vanished days
here – at the sea’s edge
I have planted a stony garden
dragon tooth dolmen spring up
to defend the porch
steadfast warriors
Indigo sky, a bright yellow half moon set amongst the stars over the shimmering lights of the nuclear plant. A keen westerly blows in a clear blue sky. I walked along the shingle and took a slip from a valerian that grows further down the road, planting it in the corner of the front bed.
Returned here after nearly a week in Berlin, where War Requiem was performed in the Zoo Palast. A shadow of my expectations. The silence at the end was a total … 30 seconds that seemed two minutes; then the audience crept out in silence, passed quietly by me as if I was a ghost come to haunt them, chill their blood.
Flew home high above sun-bright clouds. Read Pliny’s description of his house in the country:
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