“Caring for Prospect Cottage the coastal home and garden of the late Derek Jarman”
Jonny Bruce is a gardener and writer who trained at Great Dixter before spending four formative years at the organic plant nursery, De Hessenhof, in the Netherlands. Following the death of Keith Collins in 2018 Jonny became the primary gardener at Prospect Cottage in Kent - the coastal home of the late film-maker and queer activist Derek Jarman. Alongside his commitments at Prospect Cottage Jonny works as a freelance gardener and design consultant and is in the process of setting up an organic plant nursery.
Jonny takes us on a virtual visit to the garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, UK. In 1986 Jarman bought a small black-timbered fisherman's cottage on the shingle. He was to die from AIDS-related illness just eight years later but the garden he created, mainly by collecting and assembling stones and detritus from the beach, continues to have a strong influence on gardeners and artists today.
Prospect Cottage challenges many preconceptions about what a garden should be and is an intuitive example of the right plants being used in an uncompromising environment. The garden is without boundaries or fences and as a consequence stretches unhindered to the horizon in all directions. There are no lawns, no soil, just shingle ... It is a cottage garden on a domestic scale but also limitless and perfectly inserted into its place by its gardeners’ - Jarman, Collins and now Bruce - open and direct dialogue with nature.