Will I love Modern Nature?

I should have read this years ago - it was originally published in 1991 - but just had not got around to it ... and then I found a copy in a secondhand bookshop and wow - magical, moving - nature, yes, but so much more as this amazing artist builds his garden in the wildness of Dungeness. I had the pleasure of meeting him around the time this book came out - I was looking for hedgehogs (no surprise there) and was knocking on doors. He was charming and a little bemused. The world lost a supreme artist when… show more.

Derek Jarman's memoir immerses us in his world, or rather worlds - his life as a film-maker in London, and as an out gay man diagnosed with HIV at a time when that gave a grim outlook, and his other life at Prospect Cottage on Dungeness, where he enjoyed the complete contrast of quietness and often solitude. He says that in another life he could have been a gardener, and loves creating his iconic garden of pebbles, maritime plants and objects found on the shore. We go back and forth from childhood memories to the present, from accounts of making… show more.

After I first visited the extraordinary coastal landscape of Dungeness, I sought out this book. This is a nature journal. Artist and director Derek Jarman lived in Dungeness on the Kent coast (UK) in an old fisherman’s cottage painted black with striking yellow windows.

In the late 1980s, he wrote a journal in the salt breezes and shadows of two nuclear power stations. This journal charted his cultivation of the cottage’s salvaged garden, his battle with AIDS, and his reflections on the culture at the time.

What drew me into this book is its beautifully engaging voice and its sensitivity… show more.