Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.After his HIV diagnosis and father’s death, Derek Jarman, the artist, author and activist, used his modest inheritance to purchase a small fisherman’s hut on the Kent coast in 1986 for £32,000. While searching for a bluebell wood to shoot a scene from a film that would become The Garden (1990), he drove past a small wooden structure “black as pitch with bright yellow windows” and decided to buy it that very day. Bleached by sun, flooded by sea, blasted by wind, eroded by salt and flattened by sky, the Dungeness peninsula is a vast desert wasteland. But just as he refused to be cowed by his illness, Jarman was determined to create a garden among the shingle and jetsam that enveloped his cottage. Beginning with 30 rose plants, he planted around the only living thing there: a gnarled century-old pear tree. Because fences were forbidden in Dungeness, its perimeters spilled into the stony landscape like a painting without a frame: “My garden’s boundaries are the horizon,” he wrote in 1989. Thirty years after his death, Prospect Cottage and its garden have become entrenched in the British psyche as a reminder of the power of a home and its garden to be a source of energy and growth in the most challenging of times. The building still hums with creative activity, inspiring a new generation of artists through a residency programme offering space to think, reflect and create. Many of them will gather at the Barbican Hall in London on April 8 for a tribute to Jarman. Readings from his Prospect Cottage diaries (published as Modern Nature) will be performed alongside Super-8 footage of its garden from his films, which will be accompanied by original music from composers Simon Fisher Turner, Max Richter, Donna McKevitt, Valgeir Sigurðsson and Kele Okereke.Prospect Cottage is often described as Jarman’s sanctuary. But this wrongly suggests that he bought it to run away from the world, while in fact he sustained a frantically busy pace of work over these years, punctuating his life in London with retreats to Dungeness. It was not a refuge but a place of therapy and creation. It grew to become a location for Jarman’s films, a studio for the creation of many of his paintings, a setting for his diaries and the stage for a garden that is one of his most enduring artworks. As the seasons turned and Aids took the lives of many close to him, Jarman grounded himself in the irrepressible life of soil and sprout; of bud and bloom. Conceived as an evolving “pharmacopoeia” of bright flowering plants, land art and flotsam sculptures, his English garden came alive to the sound of the crashing waves, buzzing bees and larks circling high above. In the face of death and on the very edge of darkness, he created a celebration of life and an explosion of colour. A luminous, living, breathing work of art. A stake in the future. Prospect Cottage’s solitude allowed him to focus intently upon his artwork and his stays there anchored and galvanised him, bringing him closer to himself. His friends observed that it was there that the many faces of Jarman — the filmmaker, artist, queer activist, diarist, and gardener — came to coalesce. The perimeters spilled into the stony landscape like a painting without a frame: ‘My garden’s boundaries are the horizon,’ he wrote His ability to create beauty in a harsh and desolate environment drove his own resilience in the face of illness. It provided a kind of equilibrium which spurred on his activism: his striving for civil rights and resistance to the homophobic status quo. It provoked him to forge an artistic practice of a consciously modern kind: dedication to process over product, commitment to interdisciplinary artistic practice and a deeply autobiographical approach. All this he recorded in his diaries. They chronicle not only the progress of his garden but also what inspired, outraged and enlivened him: his paintings and films; his love for his companion Keith Collins and their many friends, his contempt for Thatcherite Conservatism and the failings of modern culture, his pain at the death of friends lost to Aids and the inevitability of his own demise. Above all, they tell a story of triumph over adversity. Through them, Prospect Cottage has become a site of fascination and wonder; together they have become a source of solace and inspiration for those navigating challenges in their own lives.James Dacre directs Derek Jarman’s “Modern Nature”, adapted by Living Productions & Bold Tendencies at Barbican Hall on April 8; barbican.org.ukFind out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
