Modern Nature

On a barren coast, Derek Jarman makes a garden — and records a life in which beauty, illness, anger and memory grow side by side.

After learning in 1986 that he was HIV positive, Derek Jarman began creating a garden at Prospect Cottage on the shingle coast of Dungeness. Modern Nature records that extraordinary place while moving between plants, weather, childhood memories, filmmaking, friendship, sexuality and the political realities of the AIDS crisis.

The diary follows a life still crowded with creative work and public engagement as illness becomes increasingly urgent. Against hostile AIDS reporting, Section 28, the deaths of friends and repeated medical crises, Jarman returns to the garden where roses, stones, sea kale and other forms of life endure against wind and salt.

For readers of literary diaries, nature writing, queer memoir and writing about HIV/AIDS, Modern Nature makes Dungeness both refuge and witness. It is a record of an artist continuing to notice, make and desire while the future grows more uncertain.

'An essential - urgent - book for the 21st Century' Hans Ulrich Obrist