Derek Jarman’s Garden

30th Anniversary Edition

Contributors

By Derek Jarman

By Howard Sooley

Foreword by Jamaica Kincaid

On Sale
Feb 25, 2025
Page Count
148 pages
Publisher
Timber Press
ISBN-13
9781643265353

From artist and activist Derek Jaman, a visual and narrative exploration of his singular, paradisiacal garden, set in a most inhospitable place.

Derek Jarman, a passionate gardener from childhood, combined his painter’s eye, horticultural expertise, and ecological convictions to produce a landscape that combined flints, shells, and driftwood to create a unique paradise. This book is Derek Jarman’s own record of how this garden evolved, from its earliest beginnings in 1986 to 1994, the last year of his life.

More than 150 photographs taken by his friend and photographer Howard Sooley capture the garden at all its different stages at every season. For both gardeners and admirers of this extraordinary man, this 30th anniversary edition, with a foreword by Jamaica Kincaid, marks three decades of the book as a gardening classic, and the ongoing impact of Jarman’s transformative garden—proof of the garden space as one of ideas, philosophy, and myth—more than just a place of retreat.

  • “Derek Jarman’s is a garden that truly acknowledges what any attempt at Eden is all about.”
    Jamaica Kincaid
  • "Derek Jarman’s garden is an act of hope and defiance."
    Jonny Bruce, head gardener at Prospect Cottage

Formats and Prices

Prices

  • Sale Price $24.00
  • Regular Price $30.00
  • Discount (20% off)

Price

$40.00 CAD

Format

Hardcover

Format:

Hardcover $24.00 $40.00 CAD

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.

Learn more about this author