As temperatures rise, could gravel gardens, such as Derek Jarman’s pioneering creation in Dungeness, be the answer to long, dry spells?
In the summer of 1990, Britain’s two most influential gardeners, the late Beth Chatto and Christopher Lloyd, were picnicking on the sun-baked coast of Dungeness, when they stumbled into a garden. It had no boundary: wildflowers drifted in like flotsam from the tide, arranged enticingly around a tarred timber cottage in the company of shimmering helichrysum and cotton lavender. “I made a beeline for that colour,” Lloyd later reflected, and the two wandered through, elated, scribbling notes and marvelling at plants thriving in the scorched shingle. “How surprised we were when the door opened and Derek Jarman stepped out,” Lloyd wrote. The film-maker, who lived at Dungeness until his death in 1994, was equally surprised by his esteemed trespassers, and welcomed them into Prospect Cottage.
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