The Garden of England Eerie

I first heard of Derek Jarman’s garden years ago, when my green fingers first came into bud. He planted up the shingle surrounding his Dungeness art studio that he’d escape to from the capital. He had framed it with flotsam thrown up by the waves, twisted metal and sea-sanded wood, and planted it with an eye for survival.

Kent is often called the garden of England, which always makes me think of bucolic thatched cottages rose-heavy and honeysuckle-sickly. The London train dropped me off at Rye, a town of cream teas, pensioners, cobblestoned lanes and baskets hung with geraniums, but I was searching for the garden of an angry activist artist, and fled the post-card perfect. I cycled on, past seven miles of dunes and flats at Camber Sands where shrimp fishermen were tiny dark shadows against shining seas, towards Dungeness.

This is a slightly fearful and weird place. You see no other people for miles, but are constantly reminded of danger. Glaring red signs warn you that you are so very close to military firing ranges, as the land to the horizon is owned by the British army. Behind razor-wire fences are explosion-pocked fake towns silently waiting for bombs to fall. This road is also a key route for the nuclear power station at Dungeness, and roaring high-sided lorries ferry industrial material day and night. (The land is dark and full of terror).

The wind never stops in this eerie English country-side, it whips sound away and adds a strange hallucinatory quality to the landscape. Great pylons buzz noisily as the wind picks up, fades as it drops. There are many water-filled quarries here, the constant breeze carves up the surface, the white tops are almost indistinguishable from clouds of seagulls that the wind displaces intermittently. Bird? Or wave? Or bird?

After an hour's ride, I reached Romney Marshes, the only European desert, where Dungeness leans into the wind and the spray. I found Derek’s garden, where countless others had photographed his arid flowers, but instead I found myself cycling on, drawn on by the wreckages of boats and drunk houses on the beach. I was pulled towards the original Victorian lighthouse, decommissioned after the shingle blew in and piled up around it and drove it far from the sea. I leant against the tourist shack that sells chips and local shellfish at weekends, and ate my lunch, astonished at how fascinated I was by the shadow of the power station and the stark nature of this wind-blasted village.