Wednesday, April 9, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm Eastern – Artists’ Gardens: Derek Jarman’s Garden, Online
Plants and gardens have long served as a creative inspiration for artists. They are places of color, structure and changing light, representations of memories and emotions, expressions of the cycle of life and the passing of time. When the garden is one created by the artist themself, the scope for exploration and engagement intensifies and, whether garden-lover or art-lover, we are drawn in to their stories and meanings. In this four-part series, The Gardens Trust will explore a range of gardens created and celebrated by their artist owners. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 2 weeks) will be sent shortly afterwards. Register through Eventbrite HERE
The garden at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness Point was created in the late 1980s by the maverick, controversial, supremely talented theater director, filmmaker and gay rights activist, Derek Jarman. The garden, built on a flat, desolate expanse of shingle in the shadow of the Dungeness nuclear power station, almost defies our definition of a garden: it has no borders and no boundaries. Yet Jarman created a wonderfully artistic landscape from stones, shells and driftwood scavenged from the beach, along with old tools, discarded rusty objects and an improbable array of indigenous and introduced plants. The result was a garden of ethereal beauty, and it still remains, 30 years after Jarman’s death, for us to explore, and to marvel at.
Jill Francis is an early modern historian, specialising in gardens and gardening in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, although she makes occasional forays into later gardens when they spark her interest – as here! She has taught history at the University of Birmingham and the University of Worcester and still contributes to the MA program on West Midlands History at Birmingham. She is an occasional lecturer in a variety of garden history groups and associations and is now particularly involved with the Gardens’ Trust online program, both as a speaker and as a volunteer. She also works at the Shakespeare Institute Library in Stratford-upon-Avon. Her book, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales, was published by Yale University Press (2018).
Image: Derek Jarman’s Cottage and Garden, photo ©Jill Francis
