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 1984 at the age of 40, the polymath film-maker Derek Jarman began to write his journals. In the first of these diaries, Dancing Ledge, we see his origins as a young artist, written with Jarman’s distinctive immediacy, curiosity, and candour. Behind-the-scenes of his first controversial films and stage designs, at glamorous launch parties with friends like David Hockney, Ossie Clarke and Patrick Proktor, to the trials of securing funding, Dancing Ledge is a coming-of-age memoir for all fledgling artists.

Dancing Ledge also chronicles a unique time in British history, capturing gay nightlife from the end of the war to the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

In 1986 Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the barren coast of Dungeness.

Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness.

Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living.

‘An essential – urgent – book for the 21st Century’ Hans Ulrich Obrist

This new edition features an introduction from Olivia Laing, the author of Crudo