Gardening and Art - Derek Jarman and Making

Last week I went to a talk at the Garden Museum.

Katy Hessel

was in conversation with

Flo Dill

and Charlie Porter, talking about women and gardening, making and the intersection between gardening and the arts in their wider context. I was lucky enough to have the time to arrive early and spent the afternoon revisiting the Gardening Bohemia exhibition, luckier still to meet up with Tallulah and eat dinner at the Garden Cafe before the talk.

There was half an hour to wait between the museum closing and the cafe opening for dinner. I sat outside in the graveyard cum garden and watched all the people to-ing and fro-ing while I waited for Tallulah to arrive and food to follow. I felt quite Prufrockian even though it wasn’t yet a ‘soft October night.’ I do enjoy that singular city sense of being apart from and yet a part of life in all its splendid eccentricity. I sat on the hefty gravestone of John Field ‘wax chandler’ and marvelled at how many peculiar jobs people end up having, even though there are very few career advisors suggesting wax chandlery as a suitable occupation these days. The modern John Field owns a lighting shop on Finchley Road called Chandeliereteria, selling cascading light sculptures to people who’ve seen too many episodes of Selling Sunset and want to recreate that California beach house look in the wilds of NW3.

I had two glasses of wine at dinner, which is one too many for me and culminated in me nearly concussing myself on a glass door and forgetting to use my indoor voice when a very nice lady asked to see our tickets. Whither hedonism now?

The talk was really interesting and covered a lot of ground. From Bloomsbury and the licence gardens gave to express and explore queerness to contemporary concerns around gardening and the power structures that create, maintain and gatekeep gardens, there was a lot to think about. At one point Charlie Porter referenced Olivia Laing and The Garden Against Time, which I wrote about here, and which is a terrific book to read if the themes raised in the talk are of interest to you. This naturally led to a mention of Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness, which I also write about a lot.

The talk led me to think more deeply about Jarman’s garden in terms of gate keeping and borders. There are no fences round Jarman’s garden. It is completely open, nestled in the shingle around Prospect Cottage. For years before it became a place you could officially visit, I and many other people would make a kind of pilgrimage just to visit the garden because you could see every part of it without feeling like you were invading a private space.

You can read about its evolution in the last book of Jarman’s diaries, Smiling in Slow Motion. Jarman spent a great deal of time exploring what would grow in the harsh, windswept, salt laden land. As vital as the planting is though, it is the incorporation of the flotsam and jetsam of the beach into sculptures and beds that not only roots the garden in the landscape but also elevates it to something profoundly spiritual and artistic. Laing discusses the utopian ideal in relation to Jarman’s garden as a place without borders and its openness as something radically political. The discussion at the Garden Museum helped deepen my understanding of that.

I thought about Jarman’s queerness through the lens of his garden. Dungeness was somewhere he spent the last years of his life, when AIDS was the death sentence he was already living under. His refusal to be quiet about it and fade away in polite silence was shocking at a time when just being openly gay and healthy was radical, let alone acknowledging that you were dying of a disease that was heavy with the weight of fear and stigma. His activism, his painting, his films, all stared unflinchingly at his diagnosis and the progression of his illness, but for a long time, this body of work has been eclipsed by his garden.

His paintings can be bought and put away by collectors or archived by museums. His films are art house rarities, shown in museums or seen in places like the BFI, but his garden is there for everyone, all the time. I feel that making it was a wild act of hope and defiance in the face of death and the sure and certain knowledge of mortality. The garden was created and flourished in what is a deeply hostile environment. Not only is it on windswept shingle, but it is in Britain’s only desert, with the sea on one side and a nuclear power station on the other. For me, it is a microcosm of the life Jarman found himself living as a gay man. Pushed to the margins of existence because of his sexuality, because of his refusal to play the game, because of the art he made, he too found a way to flourish in a hostile environment. While the cottage and garden face the sea, the toxic hulk of the power station ticks away in the background and I find myself thinking that there can be no more perfect metaphor for what was going on in Jarman’s life.

This is a garden where there is nowhere to hide and no attempt is made to. This garden is as open as the man who made it. As well as being a microcosm of Jarman’s life experience, I think that in the making of it, it became something bigger and more magical. Faced with hurdles and closed doors, in the garden he just took them all down. The lines between what is natural and what is cultivated blur and shift. The lines between inside and outside, private and public, yours and mine, queer and straight all dissolve here. In this garden, anything becomes possible. I’ve written about the alchemy of it before but it increasingly feels like a spell for a future where there are none of the barriers to living whatever kind of queer life you want. The garden is a world where you can flourish despite your surroundings. It is a place that catalyses hostility and borders into openness, acceptance and beauty. Such wild and queer beauty it makes my heart skip.

If you want to see the garden without visiting, I recommend Derek Jarman’s Garden with photographs by Howard Sooley. As Jarman’s reputation has risen in the decades since his death, there are increasing numbers of books about his life and work, but for me, Sooley’s images are the best. The Garden Museum also has archives of a lot of these images.

At the end of the talk, I went to have my copy of Charlie Porter’s book, Bring No Clothes signed. Porter writes about fashion and art in the way that I love, where one thing leads to another thing and stories beget other stories. In Bring No Clothes he writes about Bloomsbury and how key members of the group used clothing to express themselves artistically, creatively and relation to their gender experience. He also writes about how clothing, both wearing and making it has helped him express himself at critical times of his life, through understanding his queerness to processing his grief at his mother’s death. It’s a beautiful book and it inspired me to finally make the shift from making dolls and clothing, to starting to make clothing for myself.

I have begun by wonkily adapting some clothes I already have to make them more ‘me’. My next project though is to make a cape depicting Dungeness and Jarman’s garden. I’ve already written about how allowing myself to work with textiles has supported my therapeutic journey, making talismans and spells. For me, the cape is going to be the next part of that work. Jarman made a series of capes early on in his career and it seems logical that I make one about my feeling of profound connection with him.

I have been thinking about it for a few months now. The next step was to tell Charlie about it, because talking about it to someone else always makes it more real. Now I’m telling you, to hold myself accountable. Like all my sewing projects it will be slow, because I painfully hand sew everything without patterns and feel my way forward. That’s part of what makes it powerful for me, the doing without knowing, the trusting that during the process of making I will process deeper, more significant things. It’s exciting and scary and I can’t believe all that came out of one evening sitting on a plastic chair in a deconsecrated church listening to people talk about gardens, but it did.