From its title, this detailed journal that artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman wrote between 1989 and 1990 addresses a question crucial to the interests of not only LGBT militancy and expression, but also most contemporary identities. What relationship can a subjectivity marked, from culture, by the bias of the "unnatural" establish with nature? And in any case, with what nature? To the images of the norm, habit and regularity, these pages oppose the field of the wild, the spontaneous, of what manages to make room even in adverse conditions; To any conception of nature as an atavistic or original order, they oppose a material experience in which what is natural is mutation and the past –incarnated in the ghost of erudition– is nothing more than an assemblage of the remains of history. Culture is the given; nature, what is cultivated.

Discovering in 1986 that he was HIV positive, Derek Jarman decided to resume one of his most cherished childhood hobbies and cultivate his own garden on the arid coastal area of Cape Dungeness in southern England. His reflections on this experience combine an exhaustive botanical inventory with the archive of the history of activism and the homosexual experience in Great Britain; the details of the creation process of one of his most beautiful films, The Garden, and the conception of Eduardo II with his work with bands like the Pet Shop Boys, and the record of his medical history with a myriad of anecdotes that includes figures as dissimilar as David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Matt Dillon, Vivienne Westwood, Annie Lennox and Tilda Swinton. Between disparate loyalties, readings and gossip, Jarman offers whoever reads this book an intimacy as disturbing as that modern nature that engenders and protects in the form of a beautiful and unnatural Eden cultivated in one of the most desolate places in the world, facing a nuclear power plant, in a stone desert.