Howard Sooley, a photographer who knew Jarman, said, “He got through every illness known to humankind, remarkably, because he was always busy.” The two met in 1991 when Sooley went to photograph the garden for the magazine The Face. Later, after they became friends, Sooley helped Jarman gather flotsam for the garden on the beach, and drove the filmmaker to and from hospital many times.

“Gardening carries you to a fundamental place of living, rather than doing,” Sooley said. “When he was quite ill, he’d just grow the second we got onto Dungeness, gardening all day like he was breathing air.”

Christopher Woodward, director of the Garden Museum in London, said in a telephone interview that gardens were “more than pretty ornamental things.” A coming show at the museum about Prospect Cottage, which will feature photographs by Sooley, has been postponed to May 23 because of the coronavirus.

Gardens offer respite from the pressures of modern life, Woodward said. “You’re staring at the screen and it doesn’t make sense. Then you go out to the garden and 10 minutes later it just kind of resolves itself,” he added. “That’s the mystery of gardens.”