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The Secret Garden
The Secret Garden
Welcome, you have found the door into the secret and sacred garden dedicated to Derek Jarman

This garden was created with love by the Order of St Derek of Jarman and contains quotes from our beloved Saint and links to other sites dedicated to him.
This garden is still in the very early stages and is nowhere near complete, but then all gardens are a constant work in progress, ever changing with the seasons and growing into something new.

Stay a while and enjoy the peace and beauty, but please return soon and see how things have changed.
A garden is never truly completed.
05/11/02
All quotes on this page are from "Modern Nature; The Journals of Derek Jarman" and are copyright to the Estate of Derek Jarman unless otherwise stated.
"Pindar called Athens 'violet crowned'; garlands of violets were worn on all festive occasions, particularly the feast of Demeter, when young men were crowned with them.
~
The violet held a secret.  Along the hedgerow that ran down to the cliffs at Hordle deep purple violets grew - perhaps no more than a dozen plants.  I stumbled across them late one sunny March afternoon as I came up the cliff path from the sea.  They were hidden in a small recess.  I stood for some moments dazzled by them."
"Day after day I returned from the dull regimental existence of an English boarding school to my secret garden - the first of many that blossomed in my dreams.  It was here that I brought him, sworn to secrecy, and then watched him slip out of his grey flannel suit and lie naked in the spring sunlight.  

Obsessive violets drawing the evening shadows to themselves, our fingers touching in the purple."
"Term ended.  I bought myself violets from the florist's and put them by my bedside.  My grandmother disapproved of flowers in the bedroom, said they corrupted the air.  Violets, she said, were the flower of death.
But the violet, I discovered, was third in the trinity of symbolic flowers, flower of purity."
"Prospect Cottage, it's timbers black with pitch, stands on the shingle at Dungeness.  Built eighty years ago at the sea's edge - one stormy night many years ago waves roared up to the front door threatening to swallow it... Now the sea has retreated leaving bands of shingle.  You can see these clearly from the air; they fan out from the lighthouse at the tip of the Ness like contours on a map."
"There are no walls or fences.  My garden's boundaries are the horizon.  In this desolate landscape the silence is only broken by the wind, and the gulls squabbling around the fishermen bringing in the afternoon catch."
"The view from my kitchen at the back of the house is bounded to the left by the old Dungeness lighthouse, and the iron grey bulk of the nuclear reactor - in front of which dark green broom and gorse, bright with yellow flowers, have formed little islands in the shingle, ending in a scrubby copse of sallow and ash dwarfed and blasted by the gales."
"In the four corners of the room are driftwood stalls crowned with garlands of stone and polished bone; on one of these sits my pixie Twinkle-in-the-eye.  Purple curtains shut out the winter stars."
"Lily of the Valley was often carried in bouquets; something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue - the lily of constancy. Mary's tears, a sign of the second coming, often called 'ladder-to-heaven'.  When Mary wept at the foot of the cross her tears turned into this pure white flower of humility.
The medicinal property of the Virgin's tears was considered so strong in the Middle Ages that infusions made from them were kept in gold and silver vessels, like the jewelled reliquaries that held fragments of the True Cross.  Distilled in wine and ministered to the dumb it would restore speech and restore memory, clear as the bells of the flower."
"The rain fell through the small hours.  Dreamt of soldiers; I was reluctant to wear the smart uniform.  The handsomest I glimpsed high above me on the scaffolding around some marble ruin.  Stopped, held my breath for his beauty.  He slipped out of his uniform and, carefully folding it, placed it at the foot of my bed.  A rush of cool air as he slid beneath the sheets.  He dared not wake me as he knew I would disappear - I was his dream."
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