Dungeness - Prospect Cottage

Perhaps the most famous house is Prospect Cottage, formerly owned by the late artist and film director Derek Jarman. The cottage is painted black, with a poem, part of John Donne's "The Sunne Rising", written on one side in black lettering. But the garden is the main attraction: reflecting the bleak, windswept landscape of the peninsula, Derek Jarman's garden is made of pebbles, driftwood, scrap metal and a few hardy plants.

 

The late film-maker Derek Jarman created a wonderfully low-key and poetic garden from driftwood sculpture and the hardiest local wild plants in front of his black clapboard cottage in the shadow of Dungeness power station. It’s been maintained by his former partner Keith Collins, who tolerates the steady trickle of garden and Jarman enthusiasts taking it all in from the road. You don’t need to intrude beyond that and there is no official visiting. The cottage is on the single track Lydd road from Dungeness and visible from the miniature railway; be sure to get the right one, as the garden has been imitated by a couple of its neighbours. It’s a ten-minute walk along the shingle beach to the railway station.

 

The Sunne Rising

 

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains, call on

us?

Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide

Late schoolboys, and sour prentices,

Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,

Call country ants to harvest offices,

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of

time.

 

Thy beams, so reverend and strong

Why shouldst thou think?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,

But that I would not lose her sight so long:

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Look, and tomorrow late, tell me

Whether both the'Indias of spice and mine

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.

Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt hear: 'All here in one bed lay.'

 

She'is all states, and all princes I,

Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compar'd to this,

All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.

Thou, sun, art half as happy'as we,

In that the world's contracted thus;

Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

To warm the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

 

 

John Donne

Done