Spring is near.. and it’s time for my annual adoring post on Gay art Hero, Derek Jarman and my obsession with his garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, U.K. Both his birth and his death occurred in this month. His book about his garden was one of the first I read as a beginning landscape designer years ago and continues to inspire me in every aspect of my art making. It’s a memoir of his last days battling AIDS at his home near Kent. It’s a story that reflects his mastery of simplicity and and his passion for the backyard garden he designed and tended amongst old trainyards with an abandoned nuclear plant in the distance.Everything in the garden was built with old weathered, found pieces of wood, metal and ephemera from the surrounding area, and he successfully grew many species of perennials, shrubs, succulents, and annuals which spectacularly thrived despite the harsh and bleak conditions of the coastal region.—>EB
