WRITING | Planting people
What to do? Don’t waste time. Plant rosemary, red-hot poker, santolina; alchemise terror into art. (Laing 91) During the first Covid-19 lockdown, I became aware of a campaign to preserve artist Derek Jarman’s garden in Dungeness. Adjacent to his Prospect Cottage residence, the garden was planted by Jarman following an HIV diagnosis in 1986. The seeds he pressed into the earth, memorialising queer lovers and friends who lived with and died from AIDS, continue to grow today. Un