Queer growth: peace and refuge in

the garden
Joe Crowdy
Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness and Edward Carpenter’s garden at
Millthorpe present visions of an ambrosial queer future

‘Say you were struck down tomorrow, what would be your monument?’
This was the forthright question posed to Derek Jarman in 1988, two
years into the artist’s HIV diagnosis. ‘Oh nothing,’ he replied, ‘because film
disappears, thank God.’ Three decades later, Jarman’s films live on, but
alongside them is a more tangible, and now protected, monument: his
garden. The success of the £3.5m fundraising campaign to preserve
Jarman’s queer paradise on the shingle desert of Dungeness in Kent was
a rare piece of good news in the early days of lockdown.

This peculiar arrangement of flints, flowers and found objects is, on the
surface, a glorious anomaly in the history of gardening. Despite its unique
site and material palette, however, the garden can be understood within a
longer tradition of queer horticulture. Comparing Jarman’s gardening
practice with that of gay rights activist Edward Carpenter – who moved to
his Derbyshire home, Millthorpe, a century before Jarman escaped to
Dungeness – reveals two distinct conceptions of queer growth. These two
gardens were both isolated havens, whether from Victorian morality and
industrialisation or Thatcherite politics and AIDS hysteria. They were both
centres of pilgrimage: for devotees of their creators’ writing and art, and
for those drawn to alternative ways of living with plants and people.
As an escape from the cruelties of the city or as a space for alternative
ways of growing and living together, Derek Jarman’s and Edward
Carpenter’s gardens were each their own small Eden, providing peace and
refuge from the buffeting storm of normative social values

Credit:Picture Sheffield

Carpenter’s dream was to build, as he wrote, ‘a rendezvous for all classes

and conditions of society’, a meeting place for architects, suffragettes,
‘scythesmiths and surgeons’. He was rather bemused by how these
visitors treated him as a prophet or guru. But as an outspoken advocate of
‘homogenic love’ when sex between men had recently been criminalised,
he was surely worthy of the kind of acclaim Jarman received in 1991,
when the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence canonised him as Saint Derek of
Dungeness.

Prospect Cottage sits at the cusp of land and sea, without wall or hedge
to protect it from lashing wind or looming nuclear hum. On daily walks,
Jarman stumbled on left or washed-up waste, recording the ‘rusting
shadow on the shingles [that] was once somebody’s bed’, a ‘huge tree
whose gnarled roots still grasp the rocks torn up with it’. This apparently
inhospitable wasteland was a trove of forgotten riches for the garden: iron
bars, hooks, springs, buoys and driftwood – objects bleached of colour,
but saturated with memories of past storms, past lives. To this bricolage,
Jarman added the wild plants of the ness: gorse, broom, blackthorn,
valerian, toadflax and restharrow. The fragile blooms, sharp skeletons and
glaucous leaves of sea campion, sea holly and sea kale were planted
among weeds familiar to the inland gardener – mallow, woody nightshade
and wild pea. Cuttings from samphire growing in the shadow of the
adjacent power plant were combined with cottage garden staples from
boot fairs – lupins and wallflowers, for £1 the dozen.
At first glance, Carpenter’s garden couldn’t have been more different.
Tucked into rolling hills, it lay in a pastoral vision of England’s green and
pleasant land. Photographs show the stone facade of the house engulfed
by climbers – ivy reaching towards windows, a drift of jasmine above the
door. Parallel with the facade runs an unruly hedge, a series of shrubs
merged into one billowing lump. Tendrils and errant saplings reach up out
of it, and its base melts into grass and weeds. This is not a garden
snipped and strained into regimented order: plants are allowed to take up
space as they please, to coalesce or grow into new forms. In several
shots, figures inhabit the different rooms of the garden, looping arms,
lounging among the foliage. Here is a garden populated by the intimacy of
friends and lovers; a place where plants and people are left to spread and
lean against and towards one another.

In form, Carpenter’s garden was rather more like Jarman’s original design
for Dungeness. When he first bought Prospect Cottage, in 1986, Jarman
planned to cover the shingle with a rampant sprawl of roses, stocking up
on 30 specimens from a Kensington garden centre. As his companion,
Keith Collins, remembered, ‘Derek imagined himself surrounded by a
forest of impenetrable thorns, eventually hacked down by a true-hearted,
handsome prince’. The garden waits for its gardener, assuming the form
that will best entice his pruning impulse. When the ness failed to support
this romantic vision, Jarman instead turned to its resilient natives. In
places, these plants were left in their self-seeded positions, dictating the
centres of rings of stones which formed the outline of the garden. This
was a relationship with a physical site and ecological neighbourhood open
to chance and collaboration, where Jarman both played Mother Nature,
and submitted to the power of the ness.
The scenes in Dungeness on 22 September 1991 show less restraint, as
Jarman is canonised by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence as Saint Derek
of The Order of Celluloid Knights of Dungeness

Credit:Ed Sykes

Common to both these gardens was a sympathy for ‘queer’ plants: weeds
and overgrown shrubs of uncouth vigour. In his memoir, Second Nature,
Michael Pollan describes the naive affection for weeds that drove his first
attempt at gardening. His tolerance for self-sown species did not last
long: realising his garden would soon ‘pass for a vacant lot’, he set to
removing the biggest thugs, while carefully preserving more appealing
savages. Ultimately, however, he realised that any insurgent would always
muscle out ornamental plants, and that any affection for weeds as more
natural was a ‘romantic conceit’. Strict control, straight lines and frequent
hoeing was the only ‘responsible’ approach. Of course Pollan is not wrong
in his assertion that weeds are as much a part of human culture as
begonias and busy lizzies. But it is precisely the romantic, illogical nature
of an affection for weeds which interests me.
By definition, weeds threaten the sexual logic of horticulture, refusing to
fuck for the gardener’s pleasure. They are queer in precisely theorist Lee
Edelman’s sense of the term: a fundamentally irresponsible, destructive
force, incompatible with the ‘reproductive futurism’ of the dominant
culture. A garden overrun by weeds has no future as a garden. Edelman’s
polemic would have struck a chord with Jarman, who was ‘never …
interested in the future,’ writing that he abhorred political attempts to
‘sanitise [queer sexuality] and weave it into the fabric of bourgeois British
morality’. Unlike Pollan, Jarman relished the ineluctable power of weeds,
ceded authorship to their growth. Yet perhaps by the fact of being
tolerated, these weeds lost some of their ontological character, becoming
relics: once-weeds, performing a pastiche of their former lives.

‘These two gardens were both isolated havens,

whether from Victorian morality and
industrialisation or Thatcherite politics and AIDS
hysteria’

Dungeness is a protected site of natural diversity, but it is easy to imagine

this landscape exists in a post-apocalyptic future. The idea of the fall of
civilisation captivated Carpenter. His use of the term lacked any
connotations of technological or cultural progress: civilisation turned
‘woman into the property of the man … created a class of landless aliens
… introduced slavery, serfdom and wage-labour … created the State and
the policeman’. Capitalist growth was a disease that crushed individuals
and communities, which literally infected colonised peoples. It was with
relish, then, that he enjoyed Richard Jefferies’ vision, in After London
(1885), ‘of an utterly ruined and deserted London, gone down in swamps
and malaria, with brambles and weeds spreading through slum streets
and fashionable squares’.

A century after Jefferies imagined his protagonist crossing the overgrown

marsh of London, Jarman scavenged the rusted ruins of Dungeness.
Carpenter wrote at the zenith of industrial capitalism, a time of
unparalleled exploitation of man and nature, but also a time of hope, when
the potential of the nascent labour movement seemed limitless. Visitors
flocked to his garden for a taste of an alternative future, of sexual and
economic freedom. Jarman moved to Dungeness at the precise moment
this future died, when the modest achievement of the socialist project –
‘the welfare state that our fathers fought to establish’ – was being
dismantled, and when the freedoms won in the gay liberation movement
were poisoned by HIV and Section 28. If the garden at Millthorpe was a
manifesto, a utopian germ of new life, the garden at Prospect Cottage was
a salve, a meditation on the possibility of life and beauty amid loss and
decay.

Carpenter sits with his lover, George Merrill, at his left, resting his hand
upon the knee of close friend George Hukin, as peaceable intimacy can be
shared between male comrades in the sanctum of the garden

Credit:Sheffield Archives
Walking across the shingle in April 1989, Jarman encountered the ruins of
a garden in a crumbling Second World War barracks. Of the plants
growing there it was the bluebell – Hyacinthoides non-scripta – that sank
its roots into Jarman’s consciousness. He recalled the story of Hyacinth,
Prince of Sparta, whose beauty ‘enflamed Phoebus Apollo and whipped
Zephyrus into a frenzy of desire’. Grief-stricken after jealous Zephryus had
killed his lover, Apollo ‘raised the purple flower from drops of his blood …
so his anguish would forever echo through the spring’. Walking in a
bluebell wood today, one must remember that ‘it is dangerous to kiss
there, as the wind sighing in the branches will surely blow you and the boy
apart, your love will wilt and die as quickly as the flowers you pick. Your
hands will be stained with blood’.

Carpenter also looked to ancient precedents for queer love. The ideals of
masculine beauty and companionship embodied in classical sculpture left
him with ‘the seed of new conceptions of life’. As Jarman roamed his
nuclear oblivion, so Carpenter ‘paused, in the lanes or the fields … to
catch some magic sound, some intimation of a perpetual freedom and
gladness such as earth … had hardly yet dreamed of’. He was struck by ‘a
vision within me, of something like the bulb and bud, with short green
blades, of a huge hyacinth just appearing above the ground’. Rather than
Jarman’s hyancinth of grief and mourning, ‘it represented vigour and
abounding life’, it was ‘a sign … that my life had really at last taken root,
and was beginning rapidly to grow’.
Jarman’s garden rolls out onto the ness, unbounded by fence or edge and
unsheltered from the coastal weather that blisters this shingle desert. In
the background, the looming hum of Dungeness Nuclear Power Station
permeates the air, conjuring the spectre of a future industrial apocalypse

Credit:Howard Sooley
Carpenter’s phytomorphic vision is characteristic of his fundamentally
positive conception of queer, non-procreative growth. He would not have
recognised the term ‘queer’ as an apposite term at all: his use of ‘Uranian’
to describe those who loved people of their own gender was borrowed
from German sexologist KH Ulrichs’ term ‘Urning’, from ‘Uranos, heaven’,
his idea being that the Uranian love was of a higher order than the
ordinary attachment. Same-sex affection, for Carpenter, was a potential
source of social growth, a ‘source of energy that will be essential in
building a new society’. Like the late theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s
utopian definition of queerness as a ‘mode of desiring that allows us to
see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present’, Carpenter believed ‘the
Uranian people may be destined to form the advance guard’ of a socialist
future organised around the bond of personal affection and compassion.

Carpenter’s garden reflected a lifelong desire to become ‘united and in

line with the beauty and vitality of Nature’. The vegetal world was a great
reservoir from which to draw, fuelling the growth of new, queer, life. In the
early 1990s, Jarman lamented official attempts to raze one queer way of
life: the overgrown cruising grounds of Hampstead Heath. But plants, he
insisted, would ultimately be on his side: ‘Nature abhors Heterosoc. The
wounded glades are healing. Nature is Queer.’