From Dungeness – a letter to Derek Jarman

By Jen Green:

August 6th, 2021

Dear Derek

I thought I’d update you on your garden, as you often wondered what would become of the flowers you planted in the shifting shingle. I’m sure though, you know exactly what’s going on at Prospect Cottage because part of you is still there. 

I drove to Dungeness through the marshes, along roads with vast horizons that have the feel of dead-end tracks. After a seafood lunch at The Pilot and double checking the direction with the landlady, I walked up from there, battling blasts of wind. Trying to comprehend the basic elements of my surroundings; sky, sea, shingle, road, flatness, perceiving little more  until reaching Prospect Cottage. I too dislike rules and boundaries but in a landscape it’s a strange experience, questioning what is seashore, what is inland, where gardens begin and end. A fishing boat rides a wave of pebbles. If I’d turned back for home now, I’d say Dungeness was monochrome, exposed. But I’d seen it through your eyes and it was never bleak, there was a lifetime of curiosity.

Your house is well kept, yellow window and door frames are bright against uniform black wood. My visit feels intrusive as I approach, so I busy my eyes with plants at shingle level and avoid looking inside. Tall fennel and salty-green domes of santolina fly flags of dry flowerheads. The wild mint you found on the Ness is still here, flowering purple amongst a Mediterranean aroma – but one I can never place or track down to an individual herb. Dots of magenta from sweet pea to roses to knapweed. Low-growing plants in front of the house are well suited to winds, tiny sedum and silvery sea kale. Behind, a fig tree claims the inside corner, covering a wall, palms curling with each gust. Is this the fig you nurtured from a cutting taken on your way home? It’s flourishing. Elder trees still guard the house, their old growth a crown of sticks covered by mustard-yellow lichen, and new growth rising. Just a rose bush between you and the power station prospect; the other way, the sea. Garden and creativity unbound, like the fun you and your friends made in the freedom of these waves and levels.

In between pebbles and plants are your markers of flotsam, driftwood, scrap metal triangles, hoops and spirals, all rusted. I imagined it as if you were a giant turnstone on the shore, gathering the best of Dungeness; armfuls of stones and pockets of shoots from rubbish tips and roadsides, for restoration back in the garden microcosm. Shells and stones elevated on sticks furnish the land with shape and relief. I can see how gardening gave you hope, taking action with tangible results, of some kind. Like an alchemist planting prescriptions with the guidance of Culpeper, for protection, for healing, for sleep. A guardian creating a living, vibrant memorial, each oval flint stone a friend, a life, standing in shingle as dolmen circles of moon and sun, with the resonance of being adjusted by your hands. As dragon’s teeth they deter a foot from stepping inside the jaws, defending sedum and poppies. Sempervivums live on. With sadness I see many stones, for friends who died young. Revolutionaries like yourself braved the wilderness of a new virus. Did you imagine that people living with HIV live full, long lives and with medication, HIV is untransmissible? Perhaps you did, as 30 years on is a long time. There’s one red hot poker, encircled by a rusted chain. When asked in an interview how you’d want to be remembered, you said a flower - a red hot poker so perhaps HB kept this one for you. 

Climate change is a climate crisis, the years were getting hotter like your sunny, sweater-free birthday in January 1989. Nuclear power was not the answer and Dungeness B is now decommissioned.

Leaning to look into raised beds where terracotta pots are stacked, I find a musty but purposeful smell that could be my grandad’s shed. He kept a straight-lined, weed free vegetable garden, the kind that were common in suburbs but now replaced by driveways for cars that bring home vegetables from seasonless supermarkets. 

Other uninvited visitors nose about and sneak between plants but don’t stay for long. Four children shelter from the wind by the house, pushing each other into the gusts where they struggle to stay upright, stomping in the pebbles. I worry about the proximity of a pink mallow at foot height, but it survives their game. Wind, with free rein over flat terrain, howls in telephone wires that cross to all the houses, reminding me of the Kansas tornado that lifted Dorothy’s house. I’m not sure I could live here, but you described so much beauty over the years. Sparkling dew on shingle, the theatre of a landscape with unimpeded sunrises and sunsets, where scenes can change with just one cloud. 

When I left, with ears cold from the ceaseless blow, I snapped a poppy head and put it in my pocket. All the seeds fell out on the way home. My partner hasn’t tidied our garden since I’ve been away. July’s growth is too much to keep up with so Augusts are scruffy - ragged plants with dead sticks - out of proportion without foliage, overblown fluff, flattened long grass, half-eaten leaves and withered flowers. There is green but it’s tired. In the spring my neighbours shared their excess of spring shoots, of borage, nasturtiums and jasmine. Borage raised blue stars skywards one by one, raining seeds which I saved. Nasturtiums were quick to bloom and curl all over the hanging basket, but by late summer, their leaves and flowers are deformed and nibbled. What did you do about slugs? I tried Vaseline around the plant pot lip. One snail tried to cross but stopped, turned eyes inward, processing the gunk. The sunflower prematurely soured anyway, perhaps the pot was finally too small. It had been a seedling I’d saved from grass under the bird feeder, cupped in my hands like an ember to rekindle. Now, I’ve noticed seeds dislodged by chewing snails were caught by bare soil in a pot below, and summer’s flames are refuelled. The rose bush blooms regardless, sending out fast, straight limbs and as many bunches of fuchsia-pink roses as it can, long after all other flowers are over.  

Oh I almost forgot, Prospect Cottage has been saved from private buyers, by friends and an organisation who will dedicate it to public interest. Seeds from your garden are free, germinating in all kinds of unusual places.

Yours,

Jen

***

Jen Green is a writer based in Bristol, UK. With a Masters in Travel & Nature Writing at Bath Spa University, she explores the role that nature plays in people’s lives; of trees, parks and a view of the sky. Jen has a portfolio website at jencgreen.com

Frome Song

By Jen Green:

Pressure pulls me through pores of limestone, feeling lighter and into daylight,
where I begin overground, and half underground, I spring 
under a sycamore tree, a quiet nursery and gently, I tumble crawl, 
feel my way, joined up puddles in a green grass pasture 
where sheep nibble and drink under shade, 
young trees protected by fencing Private Property Keep Out. 
I was privatised and constrained, landscaped into ponds and pools and 
frivolous cascades, under the eye of a house made of sugar,
slave sweat sugar, stolen. I slide away to hide in depth and shadow, I go slow, 
I go quiet, glide steady, covering up with thick threads of ivy, my presence 
in the fields is given away by water-willed willow trees. 
I am a little cloudy, which suits the crayfish tickling my mud bed, two signals 
on two claws, surface sinking. Cows come to cool off, mixing mud 
with their two toes, clearing plants to let light in, warming 
my shallow waters. I am the boundary between barley, 
I am not a straight line on the map of ownership, I give to one and 
take from the other.

The suburbs grew out to meet me and I had to be straight, 
like a drainage ditch roadside, houses set up aside me, 
mills were wheeling me, now I’m more leisurely.
In Yate, houses like to look at me, people like to sit by me, stroll by 
and check up on me: ‘Slow flowing.’ ‘Slow flowing? Not moving!’ 
It’s summer, heat has taken my water, sparkling vapour dissolved in sunlight, 
roots suck at me needy, midsummer mud bed drags. 
One day I won a game and kept the prize, a tennis ball no-one could find, 
and in the town a car tyre and many shapes of plastic.

Through Yate I go along my business by roads, by industry clanging, 
where trains go by whooshing, 3 children running, 
they sing ‘Don’t Worry, ‘bout a thing’. They make a camp and tell me secrets,
of flies and gnats, sunlight sets a prism in my whole depth, alights on stones, 
but only where trees allow - they take the rest. My constant companions; 
Alder Elder Ash and Hawthorn, Alder Elder Willow and Sycamore, 
I carry their leaves, sticks and seeds. 

I see the whole sky with my whole width, opening out through fields, through 
long gold grass, wild flower weeds, flames of red dock seeds. Picking up speed 
you can call me a river, I have river weeds. 
At Algars Manor I remember wheel buckets filling for milling, wheel turning 
for grinding, but today in pools I’m resting, lily pads blanket 
where I deep sleep, when I open an eye Kingfisher plucks out my fish, 
I feed them up and give them up.
Chirrup of swallows, hiccup of moorhen, Kingfisher fly my length.

Etching out a landscape, digging little valleys; move along material, 
make a home in sandstone, limestone, mudstone, old stone from old sediment 
drifted down in shallow seas, under earth for centuries, grain by grain 
released to me, carving a story.
In Huckford Quarry the rockface shows rock time, read time line by line, 
and I’ve only read a little. Stone by stone lifted into a railway, 
arches arches arches of viaduct vibrate each time a train tracks. 

I am the song in the woods, I sing to the trees a bass line plonck plonck, 
singing over stones; trickle tur-trickle plink and plumck. Pulling a vortex, 
pushing currents through, rolling a R. Light ripples reflections underside 
leaves in intervals, mirrors of green, trunks leaning in from banks bending, 
branches bow almost in, washing robin. 
Through villages, their private gardens, under bridges, 
Frenchay and Frome Vale.

A pile of bikes in summer holidays, a raft of children shallow splashing 
with feet wet and cool, the thrill of finding out. Fishing lines tease my fish 
in the calm before the weir. Hover fly squadrons stay stationary 
between bracken and bramble.
I used to turn the wheel at Snuff Mills for Snuffy Jack, tobacco 
all down his work shirt, greasing the axle, harnessing my horsepower of 12,
I was busy for a century pushing their machinery, pushing through 
their industry, quarry blasting, hammering and horses pulling barges 
of Pennant sandstone floated down to pave the town, 
under the noses of houses, under willow river fingers.

Sometimes I feel the flow of rain pushing through earth, pouring down 
from trees, over soil over grass, I have to pull myself up, push out, 
feel a freedom from routine, I’m blind with debris, mud and trees 
I can’t stop myself. Secret sluices reduce me, weirs slow me somewhat, 
looping arcs by Eastville Park, fish slip from otter’s twilight bite.

Lifted onto concrete I can’t speak as naturally as I like, can’t sink in, 
can’t think for myself, under motorway roar. Overlaid by another flow, 
another blue map line, strictly straight. 
Caged in fencing, attractive only to rubbish and rats. 
Skateboards roll on ramps.
Brass was made at Baptist Mills, I powered the work of 25 furnaces, 
crucibles combine copper and calamine, metal molten then beaten, 
making manillas as money for slaves, cargo stowed to Africa. 
There were Twinespinners and Flaxdressers, hemp in their hands, 
spinning strands, drawing a tension to strengthen fibres turned tighter, 
walked the Ropewalk by my water.

Pushed underground, diverted into culverts, echoes in darkness, 
Frome entombed. Paved over, unseen along with history, old walls where 
I used to crawl, sewage clogged coughing. 
I made the broad meadow moat of the long-gone castle. 
Forgotten under ‘River Street’ and under a deceit of fountains.
I hear scuffles of Bristol changing, the clang of Colston’s statue 
pulled down, rolled round like a 50 pence piece harbourside and slides in; Colston, his wealth from Black lives, terror traded over the seas. 
In harbour water I hear stories of other countries, I find a tide.

***

Jen Green is a writer based in Bristol, UK. Currently studying a Masters in Travel & Nature Writing at Bath Spa University, she explores the role that nature plays in people’s lives; of trees, parks and a view of the sky. Jen has a portfolio website at jencgreen.com