Gardener cook
Columnist Jojo Tulloh is sowing climbing beans and picking early crops
Can a garden flourish without its original creator? This thought occurred to me as I contemplated the garden that film-maker Derek Jarman conjured around his tar-painted fisherman’s cottage on the shingle wastes of Dungeness, Kent. Before my visit, I’d been reading Jarman’s journals, Modern Nature, and my head was full of his voice – articulate, angry and in love with nature. His book records details of the plants able to survive the salt-laden winds and the construction of beds decorated with timber and flints foraged from the water’s edge, along with observations of the wildflowers and creatures of ‘the Ness’ and his visits to hospital (he had recently been diagnosed HIV positive).
Twenty-three years after his death, the garden Jarman made around Prospect Cottage has become a place of pilgrimage for many. Decades on, it still blooms and the wide skies and wild, desolate beauty of Dungeness are as uplifting as ever. In the shingle, luscious purple and green leaves of sea kale Crambe maritima, and the ghost-white blooms of Silene uniflora (sea campion) flourish with native vigour. The equally energetic life force that fashioned this garden can still be heard in the pages of Jarman’s books. He responded to and embellished nature, filling his garden with wild plants, such as sea kale, fennel and viper’s bugloss alongside old roses, Lavatera, Santolina and swathes of California poppies. His garden was a painterly mix of wildflowers and imports. Many of the entries in Modern Nature note days on which plants growing in the wild were propagated, mulleins dug up, slips taken from wild pears and figs, and cuttings taken from rosemary. Above all, it was this spirit of thrift, inspired by a desire to create a wild garden of heightened beauty, that I took away with me.
Back at home, June is the time to take cuttings for rosemary; just remember to take them early in the day when the shoots are turgid (full of water). Choose a non-flowering shoot and snip off 10cm, then strip off most of the lower leaves, leaving a clean length of stem. Make a cut with a sharp knife just below the leaf node (where the leaf grows). To aid rooting, make some willow tea [issue 230, page 25] and leave your cuttings to steep overnight. Fill a 13cm pot with a mix of compost and horticultural sand, and make holes with a dibber around the edge of the pot for up to ten cuttings. Water from above to settle the soil and place the pot in a heated propagator, or a plastic bag somewhere warm, to keep it moist. Take the bag off twice a week to ventilate. After a month, pot on individually.