The house that Derrick built...

So Derrick Jarman's house has been saved, Prospect Cottage, a wonderful dream made real by a dreamer. Derek Jarman was a wartime baby who died ill but not sad in 1994. An English film director who lovingly made a famous garden on the remote and unforgiving shingle shore near Dungeness nuclear power station. Dungeness, Britains only desert and Jarman, our Derrick, made it bloom and breathe and become.

Derrick believed that the Pilot Inn, nearby, provided “Simply the finest fish and chips in all England", and that was his approach to everything, fish and chips made into a gourmet experience whether it was his films, his house, his thoughts, or his garden. The garden design style is 'postmodern and highly context-sensitive - a complete rejection of modernist design theory'. But it's actually just fun. A considered, not considered, collection of junk and found things and thinks made into a wonderland of gardening by the plants and flowers that he grew in the unforgiving sea-sand and the gales. 

Derrick disliked the sterility of modernism and despised its lack of interest in poetry, allusion and stories. He was wearied by those 'How to be an expert' series of garden books. Alan Titchmarsh would not have been a dinner guest at his cosy table in his black painted, boarded, shack in the wilderness. Jarman's small circles of flints remind me of standing stones and dolmens. He once said that 'Paradise haunts gardens, and some gardens are paradises. Mine is one of them. Others are like bad children, spoilt by their parents, over-watered and covered with noxious chemicals' - and he was right. Gardens are organic by nature and they should be left to their own devices as much as possible. The poem painted on the black timber wall of Prospect Cottage is from John Donne's poem The Sun Rising opens with 'Busy old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?'

In these days of disquiet that's so bloody real. Awaking each day to the sun is such a bonus. Jarman's blueprint for life is one I aspire to. He was a complicated man intent on uncomplicating himself through his lifestyle. I think he achieved it.

It's just the sun rising.