On visiting Derek Jarman's Garden

There are times, I think, in every writer's life, when inspiration feels in short supply, when everyday events take over and fresh input is needed if we're going to thrive creatively. I hit this point a week or so ago and we took a decision to get away. We are now staying in Rye, on the South Coast of England, a town I last visited as a child of eight years old, a place that held strong personal memories. My family is sleeping as I write.

I knew, when we set off, that I wanted to visit Derek Jarman's garden at Dungerness, a pilgrimage I've desired to make for some years (yet have always somehow put off). So it was a thrill, today, to finally visit the landscape that I'd first read about eight years ago when researching my novel 'Bluethroat Morning'.

I've long admired Howard Sooley's photos of Jarman's garden. For those not familiar with the garden, the British filmmaker Jarman called his garden 'Paradise' yet it was planted in a landscape that some might consider more of a hell than a heaven - in the 'flat, bleak, often desolate expanse of shingle that faces the Nuclear Power Station in Dungeness, Kent'. Spurred on by a true personal vision, his painterly eye and strong ecological conviction, Jarman tended the garden from 1986 until his death.

It is difficult to begin to express the intensity of my experience today, on visiting the garden. Suffice for the moment to say that it has strengthened my conviction in the necessity and power of art, of beauty and the individual vision of each human being. I am, I admit, in pensive mode right now. How could I not be? I've begun each day of the school Easter holidays by remaining in bed with Louis Fischer's 'Life of Mahatma Gandhi'. It is difficult not to question one's own motives, the values of one's own actions, when considering a life as meaningful as Gandhi's. The effect of Jarman's garden on me, however, has been to remind me that one does not have to change the world in huge ways to make an important impact. Jarman's faith in nature, in beauty, in the power of the human spirit, in love, in poetry - all these have a huge impact on anyone who visits this garden or simply reads Jarman's words and views Sooley's photographs in the book 'Derek Jarman's Garden'.