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Pharmacopoeia: A Dungeness Notebook
'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
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
160 pages, Paperback
First published March 3, 2021
14 people are currently reading
320 people want to read
About the author
Derek Jarman
33 books204 followersDerek Jarman was an English film director, stage designer, artist, and writer.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
July 31, 2022
Derek Jarman is dying. He is HIV-positive and slowly disintegrating into the ether. Having always found solace in nature, he flees to Dungeness – and a ramshackle cottage that sits in the shadow of a nuclear power station. The absurd juxtaposition of this image delights Jarman – a man who'd resided firmly outside the box, waging a flourished battle against conformity.
You can see this uniqueness in his films; 'Caravaggio' and 'The Last of England' are among his finest. The BFI writes that; "if you wanted to seem sophisticated in the 1980s, you went to see a Derek Jarman film." He pushed boundaries and found beauty in the unknown space that lay beyond. He also introduced us to Tilda Swinton, so I believe cinephiles owe him a great debt.
Back to the cottage. Pharmacopoeia – in a historical context, is a book or manual that details the medicinal uses of natural flora. The book instructs the reader on the ways to combine these ingredients to make remedies and drugs. Jarman's pharmacopoeia reads similarly. He details the vegetation bountiful around Dungeness, noting its significance in the history of medicine, folklore, and mythology. Gradually, however, it becomes clear that Jarman is trying to source a cure for the disease that is eating away at his body. Interspliced with diary entries and poems, you are reading the ruminations of a man closing the chapter on this life – and dreaming about the next.
It's poignant and beautifully written, without an ounce of self-pity. Rather, Jarman remarks on the natural beauty of life, the organic fluctuations of love, and the enigmatic nature of fate, noting how it flies by all too quickly. Before you know it, the day is done – but "just before sunset, a rainbow glows across a dark sea offset by violet-pink cumulonimbus clouds."
You can see this uniqueness in his films; 'Caravaggio' and 'The Last of England' are among his finest. The BFI writes that; "if you wanted to seem sophisticated in the 1980s, you went to see a Derek Jarman film." He pushed boundaries and found beauty in the unknown space that lay beyond. He also introduced us to Tilda Swinton, so I believe cinephiles owe him a great debt.
Back to the cottage. Pharmacopoeia – in a historical context, is a book or manual that details the medicinal uses of natural flora. The book instructs the reader on the ways to combine these ingredients to make remedies and drugs. Jarman's pharmacopoeia reads similarly. He details the vegetation bountiful around Dungeness, noting its significance in the history of medicine, folklore, and mythology. Gradually, however, it becomes clear that Jarman is trying to source a cure for the disease that is eating away at his body. Interspliced with diary entries and poems, you are reading the ruminations of a man closing the chapter on this life – and dreaming about the next.
It's poignant and beautifully written, without an ounce of self-pity. Rather, Jarman remarks on the natural beauty of life, the organic fluctuations of love, and the enigmatic nature of fate, noting how it flies by all too quickly. Before you know it, the day is done – but "just before sunset, a rainbow glows across a dark sea offset by violet-pink cumulonimbus clouds."
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May 31, 2022Feel like I cannot give this any sort of rational or insightful rating or review, since I read it in a shack in Dungeness, twenty minutes up the road from Jarman's cottage, a trip planned expressly because of an affinity for the Flattest Landscape Outside The Netherlands derived from his own!
"It's wonderful, a day alone, looking after myself quite successfully."
"It's wonderful, a day alone, looking after myself quite successfully."
June 1, 2022
‘the garden as pharmacopoeia has failed’ – Derek Jarman, Pharmacopoeia, p. 95
It's difficult to give this book three stars because the writing is five stars but there’s a strange silence at the heart of it, a softening of Derek’s sexuality, which is integral to the Modern Nature narrative. Why remove it? Why not put something fully new together? I like the concept, I like the production and I love Derek, but because I know that this wasn’t put together by Derek, I am full of suspicion. A book so pretty, a book so marketable, free from the inconvenience of the man’s sexuality, apart from sad reflections about his health and the death of his friends. Even the visit from the sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is curiously G rated. The foreword from Tilda Swinton is nice, although subdued and elegiac. It’s mostly the other half of Derek’s anecdote about finding the cottage and Swinton’s declaration of love and to him as a friend. The book is treading the same ground as Modern Nature but neutered of its less picturesque moments, stripped of its anger and its queerness; all that’s left of Derek is a melancholy man, frail and listless among his plants. The book is strongest when it decentres Derek, making him a Culpeper or Gerard figure, and trading on the white witch of Dungeness reputation he enjoyed. It does this by bringing a selection of his plant lore together, laying it out in sections, which wouldn’t feel out of place in a modern herbal. I’m up for a full blown Jarman’s Herbal.
It's difficult to give this book three stars because the writing is five stars but there’s a strange silence at the heart of it, a softening of Derek’s sexuality, which is integral to the Modern Nature narrative. Why remove it? Why not put something fully new together? I like the concept, I like the production and I love Derek, but because I know that this wasn’t put together by Derek, I am full of suspicion. A book so pretty, a book so marketable, free from the inconvenience of the man’s sexuality, apart from sad reflections about his health and the death of his friends. Even the visit from the sisters of Perpetual Indulgence is curiously G rated. The foreword from Tilda Swinton is nice, although subdued and elegiac. It’s mostly the other half of Derek’s anecdote about finding the cottage and Swinton’s declaration of love and to him as a friend. The book is treading the same ground as Modern Nature but neutered of its less picturesque moments, stripped of its anger and its queerness; all that’s left of Derek is a melancholy man, frail and listless among his plants. The book is strongest when it decentres Derek, making him a Culpeper or Gerard figure, and trading on the white witch of Dungeness reputation he enjoyed. It does this by bringing a selection of his plant lore together, laying it out in sections, which wouldn’t feel out of place in a modern herbal. I’m up for a full blown Jarman’s Herbal.
April 20, 2022
A really intensely beautiful collection of diary entries flitting between the ancient myths behind his grown garden & his day to day life at Dungeness.
June 13, 2023
a delight for the senses, a catalogue of garden flowers and plants, grief threaded in the dirt beneath - the formation of a kind of utopia
April 15, 2022
This is a 'greatest hits' compilation of Jarman's nature writing, drawing on selections from Modern Nature, Smiling in Slow Motion, Chroma (my favourite), and Derek Jarman's Garden. They're short, flinty extracts of his gorgeous prose, glancing off each other by the hand of a skilled editor (who is not named anywhere in the book? not even a team of them? an odd omission.)
It's by no means an essential book, particularly not if you've read Jarman more widely, but it has value as an introduction to the man and his work, and the way it can be opened at random to a rhapsodic ode to Jarman's garden at Prospect Cottage.
It's by no means an essential book, particularly not if you've read Jarman more widely, but it has value as an introduction to the man and his work, and the way it can be opened at random to a rhapsodic ode to Jarman's garden at Prospect Cottage.
April 9, 2023
En fin följeslagare i den engelska våren.
Här i närheten ämnar jag fira en BIG b-day och thoreau my life away:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbGbT...
"There are no walls or fences.
My garden's boundaries are the horizon."
Nu har jag besökt hans trädgård. Till Derek J:s ära lägger jag härmed till den något nischade kategorin 'plants and power plants' till goodreads-biblioteket. Mångbottnad symbolik i det där med att leva och överleva i en hotfull miljö; kärnkraftverket, Thatchers regering etc.
Förra året vid den här tiden läste jag At Your Own Risk, en brittisk Just Kids. Bl.a. beskrev Jarman hur han en gång "hittade" ett stort övergivet warehouse space vid Southwark eller Southbank och helt enkelt flyttade in och gjorde det till sin ateljé. Något liknande hände när han var ute på biltur med Tilda Swinton nere i Kent. Syftet var egentligen att hitta en plats att filma på, men där fanns den nedgångna fiskestuga som blev hans paradis, Prospect Cottage. Det där kan inte förekomma i vår tid, tyvärr, allt är redan ett airbnb eller gentrifierat eller typ redan ombyggt till Tate Modern.
Den här boken är till sin form mer dagbok eller ett urval texter än memoarer och därmed mer eftertänksam och stillsam. Perfekt påskläsning.
Här i närheten ämnar jag fira en BIG b-day och thoreau my life away:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbGbT...
"There are no walls or fences.
My garden's boundaries are the horizon."
Nu har jag besökt hans trädgård. Till Derek J:s ära lägger jag härmed till den något nischade kategorin 'plants and power plants' till goodreads-biblioteket. Mångbottnad symbolik i det där med att leva och överleva i en hotfull miljö; kärnkraftverket, Thatchers regering etc.
Förra året vid den här tiden läste jag At Your Own Risk, en brittisk Just Kids. Bl.a. beskrev Jarman hur han en gång "hittade" ett stort övergivet warehouse space vid Southwark eller Southbank och helt enkelt flyttade in och gjorde det till sin ateljé. Något liknande hände när han var ute på biltur med Tilda Swinton nere i Kent. Syftet var egentligen att hitta en plats att filma på, men där fanns den nedgångna fiskestuga som blev hans paradis, Prospect Cottage. Det där kan inte förekomma i vår tid, tyvärr, allt är redan ett airbnb eller gentrifierat eller typ redan ombyggt till Tate Modern.
Den här boken är till sin form mer dagbok eller ett urval texter än memoarer och därmed mer eftertänksam och stillsam. Perfekt påskläsning.
September 12, 2024
No words just brilliant
May 31, 2023
“Love is life that lasts forever.”
Started reading sat on a sleeper at the bottom of Jarman’s garden looking out to the nuclear power stations. Finished reading on a rattling bus somewhere between Margate and Canterbury. Vast horizons laid out before me from start to finish.
Started reading sat on a sleeper at the bottom of Jarman’s garden looking out to the nuclear power stations. Finished reading on a rattling bus somewhere between Margate and Canterbury. Vast horizons laid out before me from start to finish.
February 17, 2023
subtly heart-wrenching plant-naming induced trance
March 19, 2025
Picked this book up in a bookshop and opened it to a random page. Read a beautiful passage and made a note to buy it later. Went back and opened it again to the same random page—fate!—and bought it.
Alas, this collection of Derek Jarman’s writing is not a collection of his best work. It is a collection of work about gardening. I think it would be a perfect gift for an older, arty gardener, but it was a bit whatever for the casual Jarman enjoyer.
Jarman is a nice writer, if at times a little :3 vibes. What I expected to read was the 60-something artist tending to his garden as a way of coping with late-stage HIV complications. The book is much more plainly about the garden and flowers, although his HIV is a bigger theme towards the end. The best line: ‘Love is life that lasts forever.’
Nice book, will give to my manager who loves gardening. I’m keen to read a different Jarman book soon.
Alas, this collection of Derek Jarman’s writing is not a collection of his best work. It is a collection of work about gardening. I think it would be a perfect gift for an older, arty gardener, but it was a bit whatever for the casual Jarman enjoyer.
Jarman is a nice writer, if at times a little :3 vibes. What I expected to read was the 60-something artist tending to his garden as a way of coping with late-stage HIV complications. The book is much more plainly about the garden and flowers, although his HIV is a bigger theme towards the end. The best line: ‘Love is life that lasts forever.’
Nice book, will give to my manager who loves gardening. I’m keen to read a different Jarman book soon.
January 5, 2026
Pharmacopoeia is a quietly beautiful book. Jarman writes with close attention to colour (the grey sky reflected on spring fields, the sharp green of leaves, the subtle bruises of flesh) so that seeing becomes an act of care. The prose blends botanical knowledge, queer desire, and reflection on mortality, giving ordinary matter weight and presence. The spectre of HIV, though present, feels held at a distance by the book’s beauty, allowing tenderness to take its place. It reminded me that noticing the world closely, its colours and textures, can be a form of care. I have friends who I think would love this book far more than my uncultured self.
March 8, 2022
A beautifully chosen and wonderfully presented collection of Jarman's writings about Dungeness, his garden and his house, Prospect Cottage. These are taken from his diaries and other writings towards the end of his life. This is a fantastic introduction to Jarman's world and the talismanic power of gardening.
August 13, 2022
One of the joys our technological civilisation has lost is the excitement with which seasonal flowers and fruits were welcomed; the first daffodil, strawberry or cherry are now things of the past, along with their precious moment of arrival.
December 26, 2022
A Frankenstein book, chopped together from various parts of Jarman’s previous collections. Despite having read them all before, I still found much in this; the presentation of the extracts in a new context giving them newer, sometimes deeper meanings.
February 18, 2023
Derek comes with spring—mostly marigold/rose-tinted—into some really dull, lethargic mornings. I can always count on him: the wonders a man can make out of colour, herbs, mythologies! Gay white magic. And lots of sunshine.
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November 3, 2022‘But I’m happy here, brewing a scatterbrained mix of soups and porridge.’
February 6, 2023
Fantastic book, snippets of Derek Jarmans writings, a great introduction that makes me want to explore more of his books.
September 6, 2023
It took me a while to appreciate this book, but I finally did. It is interesting, poetic and surprisingly not sad.
April 19, 2024
Too flowery for me…I’ll stick with the movies.
August 28, 2024
Poignant collection of writings by Jarman of the place and plants that were his solace
October 9, 2024
words aren’t coming to me yet.
October 21, 2024
Just beautiful. It inspired me to visit Dungeness which I fell in love with.
December 26, 2024
Love this small book filled with the garden and nature bits from many of his book. The first Kentish saint since queer Thomas of Canterbury, according to Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
December 30, 2024
Beautiful and devastating!
January 19, 2025
Very sad but also very beautiful. It really makes Prospect Cottage and Dungeness come alive.
January 26, 2025
I read this in one sitting over coffee this morning… so gorgeous.
November 1, 2025
Gorg of course
November 2, 2025
Beautiful and heart-stirring prose; Jarman describes nature the way only an artist is able to <3
January 11, 2026
Just beautiful. Such lovely poetic writing. Put together with care and a real feeling for the thread of thought during his time at Prospect Cottage and his healing garden .
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews