About

"The film is structured like a dream allegory, in a poetic tradition, rather like Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The film is a dream allegory of the author, in this case, myself. I could have put somebody else into it but really dreams are always in the first person, though some people often invent proxies. I go to sleep and go on a mental journey."
Derek Jarman, The Garden Press Kit (1990)

The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time—the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.
Derek Jarman, Modern Nature (1991)

The Garden is Derek Jarman's contemplation of religion, love and time that recasts biblical stories as dream allegories. The project began as a proposed sequel to The Last of England that would use the Gospels of Mark and Luke as a template for illustrating redemption through suffering. One of the film's working titles was Borrowed Time, pointing to film's subtext of the experience of living with HIV and how Jarman felt about his own declining health. Yet Jarman resisted the idea that The Garden should be seen as an AIDS-related film, arguing 'AIDS was too vast a subject to "film". All the art failed. It was well-intentioned but decorative.'

The Garden is structured around a series of vignettes, each borrowing iconography from the New Testament that Jarman relates to the persecution and martyrdom of gay men in contemporary Britain. The film references two key gardens depicted in the scriptures – the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden from Genesis and the Garden of Gethsemane in Matthew which Jesus visits after his last supper. With little dialogue or narrative, the film opens with Michael Gough directing the viewer: 'I want to share this emptiness with you; not fill the silence with false notes, or put tracks through the void. I want to share this wilderness of failure. The others have built you a highway, fast lanes in both directions. I offer you a journey without direction, uncertainty and no sweet conclusion. When the light faded, I went in search of myself. There were many paths and many destinations.'

The Garden is also connected to the real garden Jarman built with his partner Keith Collins at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, the progress of which is the subject to the diary he began on Jan 1, 1989. This old fisherman's cottage in the southeast of England and the bleak coastal landscape surrounding it (inclusive of a nuclear power station in the distance) are the central location and character in Jarman's film. The Dungeness garden would be an increasingly important space for Jarman as his health deteriorated, and in a short film made for the BBC program Gardener's World after his death, Collins spoke of its continued significance: 'After Derek died the whole garden was imbued with this notion 'death'. And in that year, two small birds made a nest in the elder by the kitchen. And it changed for me the whole meaning of the garden from being about sadness to being about life and regeneration.'

Jarman's work in music videos – in particular the series of projections used as backdrops for the Pet Shop Boys'MCMLXXXIX tour – funded the film's production and influenced the film's use of video compositing. Rough edits of the film were made on VHS and U-matic, allowing Jarman to shape the film from the many hours of footage recorded before recreating in high-band format.