Derek Jarman

About the Author

Derek Jarman was a filmmaker, artist, activist and prominent figure in avant-garde London circles from the 1970s to the ’90s, who became a voice in AIDS activism after being diagnosed in 1986. Always a gardener, he bought Prospect Cottage in the final decade of his life and made it his focal point–planting indigenous plants and pollinators, inviting nature into the shadows of the nuclear waste plant—a place which has since become iconic for being a paradise situated at the seeming ends of the earth in Dungeness, UK, one of the largest expanses of shingle (which is basically waterworn gravel) in Europe.