Photographer Howard Sooley reflects on time spent with his friend the film maker and artist Derek Jarman at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, creating an iconic garden on the exposed Kent coast. Words and photographs by Howard Sooley <\/p>

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The sun<\/a>, the sea, the salt in the wind, erode everything here. Nothing is permanent, not even the land itself, a temporary shifting spit of shingle jutting out into the English Channel. The winter storms or the bulldozer have taken most of the old fishermen\u2019s sheds from the beach, wiped clean by time\u2019s incoming tide. Derek Jarman died in February 1994 (less than two weeks after his 52nd birthday), leaving behind a fine legacy of films, paintings, books\u2026 and a small, black, tar-painted fisherman\u2019s cottage in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station.<\/p>
Its small garden gained acclaim after the publication of the book, Derek Jarman\u2019s Garden<\/em>, in 1995 and many subsequent magazine articles (the first of which appeared in Gardens Illustrated<\/em> in the same year). As a garden it is unusual and inspirational. It has always had a steady stream of visitors, from curious passersby to people making pilgrimages from all over the world. <\/p>
My story with the garden started in 1990 when I was commissioned to photograph Derek. Pulling up on Dungeness Road, I stared out of the car window on to a post-apocalyptic nuclear vision: a long, snaking road strung with a line of black fishermen\u2019s cottages like tar-covered fairy lights<\/a>; a beach strewn in a mess of seemingly abandoned fishing boats and huts, which looked like they\u2019d just tumbled from the sky and landed randomly among the sea kale that inhabited the beach.<\/p>
\u00a9 Howard Sooley<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Dungeness was England through the looking glass, not William Blake\u2019s bucolic vision of a Jerusalem in this \u2018green and pleasant land\u2019. Stark, barren, the sun searing down or rain whipping across the landscape \u2013 everything seemed to be dying. Bleached by the sun, ripped by the wind, eaten by salt, laid bare and exposed by the enormity of the sky. A world stripped to its bones, abandoned and motionless except for the dried seedheads of sea kale blowing like tumbleweed in the shadow of the power station. The images are etched in my memory.<\/p>
Derek was standing outside Prospect Cottage<\/a> in an old French labourer\u2019s shirt, long, white linen blowing like a sail in the wind, watering can<\/a> in his hand. Looking back, I can still feel my heart quake; the day seemed so perfect, outside of time. But somewhere a clock was ticking; I suppose we just couldn\u2019t hear it, drowned out by the sound of the wind and the tide running along the shoreline. After that first day we became good friends. I was to spend much of the next four years gardening with him at Prospect Cottage, or visiting nurseries strung out along the various possible routes between London and the Kent coast.<\/p>
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\u00a9 Howard Sooley<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div><\/div>
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\u00a9 Howard Sooley<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div><\/div><\/div>