Un jardin face à la catastrophe - Derek Jarman à Prospect Cottage

In 1986, having just learnt that he was HIV-positive and that his time was running out, the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman set about planting a garden. It was a patch of stony ground surrounding a fisherman’s hut on the Dungeness plain in Kent. Over the years, and until his death in 1994, this space filled with flowers, scrap metal, driftwood and objects salvaged from the nearby beach. He named it ‘Prospect Cottage’. Life and death coexist there, amidst the flowers and crosses, making this garden-cemetery a place paradoxically brimming with vitality, which Jarman himself described as both Eden and Gethsemane. Now one of the most visited gardens in England, it became, in Jarman’s final years, the centre of his life and artistic creation — perhaps even his most important work. Indeed, it features in his films, his writings and his final paintings.

Since 2010, Marco Martella has been editor of the journal Jardins (published by Éditions des Pommes sauvages), an annual, thematic publication that explores the garden from a philosophical, existential and poetic perspective. His stories and essays, published under his own name or using pseudonyms, have been published in French, Italian, Spanish, German, Hebrew and Croatian.