DEREK JARMAN’S GARDEN AT DUNGENESS

No one knows where Dungeness is. Bill thought it was near Aldeburgh and Rosie Sturgis in Wales. It’s a high spur of shingle deposited by floods in Kent when a frozen North Sea thawed after the last Ice Age and flooding the vast plain of Doggerland pushed through the Channel. Ann and I found we were both reading Derek Jarman’s Journals, and had to visit his garden in the shingle of Dungeness. Jarman started the garden when he was already dying of Aids but it took more than four years to kill him. He bought this black wooden fisherman’s cottage, and among the surrounding shingle set about...