Long before I became Poet Laureate for the city of Canterbury, there was a festival there to which I was regularly invited. I'd always loved the fire and openness of Derek Jarman's work. His films, his memoirs, and particularly his gardening book, which blew my heart wide open when I was first given a copy. Though we were so different, his art and his desire for freedom resonated deeply in my own spirit.

And so, after wrapping up a festival visit one year, knowing that Dungeness and Jarman's garden were just another couple of hours away, instead of heading home I drove the wrong way, camera at hand, hoping to discover whether, though he was gone, something of his soul might still be living in the garden.

Jarman had carved a garden into a landscape where a garden seemed almost impossible. The great shingle wilderness of Dungeness, so often called Britain's only desert, with the nuclear power station just across the way. I remember looking down into the stones and seeing a tiny scorpion going about its scorpion business. Here was life making itself in the most unlikely of places.

I allowed my truer eye to look through the camera and simply be there. These were not pictures I went looking for, but moments of aliveness and connection caught in ones and zeros, with sense memory tuning the camera's settings to the field of my heart and the resonant life of the garden.

Here was the garden of an outsider meeting the living spirit of another outsider, one igniting the other. Whether through the camera or the pen, painting, film, dance, or a flower growing where no flower should be, I recognised something of the freedom I had sought throughout my own life. Having been an outsider both in art and in life, this encounter informed me of much that I needed to know at that time.

Time, of course, passes. The garden as it is today is not the garden as it was then. But through photographs and writing we can do more than preserve. We can steward something of these encounters, these truths, and leave space for the viewer or reader to discover the life in themselves.

These photographs were made several years before their publication in Jardins singuliers / Unique Gardens, by Sophie Barbaux, Éditions ICI Interface, Paris, 2015.