Pharmacopoeia

''I planted a dog rose. Then I found a curious piece of driftwood and used this, and one of the necklaces of holey stones on the wall, to stake the rose. The garden had begun. I saw it as a therapy and a pharmacopoeia.'' In 1986 artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman, bought Prospect Cottage, a Victorian fisherman''s hut on the desert sands of Dungeness. It was to be a home and refuge for Jarman throughout his HIV diagnosis, and it would provide the stage for one of his most enduring, if transitory projects - his garden. Conceived of as a ''pharmacopoeia'' - an ever-evolving circle of stones, plants and flotsam sculptures all built and grown in spite of the bracing winds and arid shingle - it remains today a site of fascination and wonder.Pharmacopoeia brings together the best of Derek Jarman''s writing on nature, gardening and Prospect Cottage. Told through journal entries, poems and fragments of prose, it paints a portrait of Jarman''s personal and artistic reliance on the space Dungeness offered him, and shows the cycle of the years spent there in one moving collage.''[Derek] made of this wee house, his wooden tent pitched in the wilderness, an artwork - and out of its shingle skirts, an ingenious garden - now internationally recognised. But, first and foremost, the cottage was always a living thing, a practical toolbox for his work'' Tilda Swinton, from her Foreword

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