On 22 December 1986, Jarman was diagnosed as HIV positive and discussed his condition in public. His illness prompted him to move to Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, in Kent, near the nuclear power station. In 1994, he died of an AIDS-related illness in London, [8] aged 52. He was an atheist. [9] He is buried in the graveyard at St Clement's Church, Old Romney, Kent. Facing an uncertain future, he nevertheless found solace in nature, growing all manner of plants. While some perished beneath wind and sea-spray others flourished, creating brilliant, unexpected beauty in the wilderness.

Michael Derek Elworthy Jarman [2] (31 January 1942 – 19 February 1994) was an English artist, film maker, costume designer, stage designer, writer, gardener, and gay rights activist. Jarman's idea for producing Blue was to create "a world to which refugees from... dark space may journey." The film takes its viewers on a spiritual and melancholic journey through illness, hope, love, and transformation. Death looms as a dark inevitability beyond the edges of Blue, which finishes with the lines: Our time is the passing of a shadow / And our lives will run like / Sparks through the stubble / I place a delphinium, Blue, upon your grave. Through the film, writes Attard, Jarman "asks for us to recognize not just our role as spectator observing a man delivering a postscript on his life, but as beings who share the universal need to find the sublime in never-ending despair, a call to both radical empathy and introspection." In the first week of March, Jarman arrives at what may be the greatest reward of gardening, evocative of poet Ross Gay’s lovely sentiment that time spent gardening is “an exercise in supreme attentiveness.” He writes: Marc Almond – "Tenderness is a weakness" ". mvdbase.com. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016 . Retrieved 15 July 2012.The terrible dearth of information, the fictionalisation of our experience, there is hardly any gay autobiography, just novels, but why novelise it when the best of it is in our lives?” (April 15, 1989) – not true of the three decades since!

Modern Nature is both a diary of the garden and a meditation by Jarman on his own life: his childhood, his time as a young gay man in the 1960s, his renowned career as an artist, writer and film-maker. It is at once a lament for a lost generation, an unabashed celebration of gay sexuality, and a devotion to all that is living. During the 1980s, Jarman was a leading campaigner against Clause 28, which sought to ban the "promotion" of homosexuality in schools. He also worked to raise awareness of AIDS. His artistic practice in the early 1980s reflected these commitments, especially in The Angelic Conversation (1985), a film in which the imagery is accompanied by Judi Dench's voice reciting Shakespeare's sonnets.

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But as he explained to the painter Maggi Hambling, his interests did not entirely square with those of a stately Victorian naturalist. “Ah, I understand completely,” she replied. “You’ve discovered modern nature.” The definition was ideal, encompassing both reeling nights cruising on Hampstead Heath and the waking nightmare of HIV infection. His capacity to write honestly about sex and death makes much contemporary nature writing seem prissy and anaemic.