This 3 part series by Simon Schama was wonderful. This was the review in the Herald:
The final episode concluded with these words by Simon Schama:
“He writes that he’d always loved gardening as a little boy in his parents house, so he created, against all the odds, this extraordinary place. There are these kind of salty, violent winds that ripped out his irises, did horrible damage to his roses, and you just feel the unforgiving word. As he dug inside these shingles, he woke up to the destruction when yet another storm came crashing past the cottage, and he carried on doing it. He wanted those last years of his life to be this, you know, things that bloom and blossom and give light and happiness. He created something gorgeous. Here, Jarman tapped into one of the deepest wellsprings of traditional British life, gardening. But his garden was not simply a therapeutic escape.
Already, the homosexual community is finding itself the target of hatred and discrimination. Even a bishop said that he found it difficult to shake hands with an aid sufferer a private member his garden was a work of art which in the time of paranoia and hostility towards the gay community distilled his vision of how the world should be not divided, but a place of acceptance and inclusivity. And what I really love about this place is that it is not a classic English Garden. Derek collected driftwood. This garden is full of bits of rusting iron, old anchor chains. There’s even the power station in gorgeous kind of harmony with the most beautiful flowers. We kind of knew that they kind of collided together. They made a kind of mess together, and Derek. Drama was all about the happiness of mess. So what we have here is the meeting place of humanity.
He did not want to do a garden with fences, with hedges. You know, this is someone for whom there are no barriers. He said the boundary is the horizon, and that, that I think is kind of profoundly, you know, profoundly moving as his flowers bloomed, Jarman faded, but he found what he described as extraordinary peacefulness. He connected to one of our most powerful yearnings, to find in nature consolation for our mortality.
Derek Jarman: “The sun comes up in the front of the house, and it goes down the back, and I see the sun all day fits there, and I can see the scene. The great thing about the sea is it changes every color you could imagine. I’ve seen the sea pink and brown and Aquamarine and black, and I says, watch this, and somehow you have to sit there and watch this happening.”
Jarman, really, I think, is thought of rightly, you know, as a genius for inspirational comedy, for the dystopian wildness of punk breakdown in Britain, and he’s wonderful at that, but it’s when he comes here. He opens himself to illumination. He calms down, he’s attentive, he’s quiet. He knows time is running short, and therefore he wants to kind of not let go of the things that are really profound and important, and it leads him to connect the place in a visionary way with the great beyond, wherever the beyond it is that he’s going so the haven Jarman created in this unfenced, unassuming patch of land, and the flowers he planted, still battling against the wind, remain as a defiant cultural statement asking us to stop and think about what kind of world we want to live in.
I look. Around towards the end of, you know, long life, and you can’t help thinking this is an epoch above all of distraction, where the difference between the profound and the trivial is being lost, the kind of idiot roar of the culture wars, the drone and the white noise, which makes it obligatory to stand in one camp or the other, and the two camps are at each other’s throats when culture actually does the opposite. Part of the power and the indispensability of culture is that it’s for everybody. It’s more likely to be a place where we can recognize what we have in common, which is not to say it’s kind of warm and cuddly. The greatest works of art very often are the opposite, but they do give us a recognition of what we have in common as fallible human beings. So people need to think of art and culture not as an add on to life, but actually as the difference between cultural life and death. I deeply think that it’s there that will get the best shot of the endurance of humanity, at least I sure hope so.”