This is the last book the late film-maker, artist and writer Derek Jarman worked on before his untimely death early last year. It is not a substantial text, not like the diaries of Modern Nature, the autobiography of Dancing Ledge, or the astonishing bilious invective of The Last of England. Indeed, Jarman's words only occupy a fraction of these 144 pages; the bulk are given over to photographs - by his good friend, photographer Howard Sooley - of the garden he fashioned from the rocky beach beside his fisherman's cottage in Kent. In the shadow of the omnipresent nuclear power station - "the great liner of Dungeness B" - Jarman realised his earth-bound paradise, an almost haphazard conglomeration of indigenous flowers, weeds, brought-in vegetables and herbs, and elaborate garden sculpture made from beach detritus. A sea-tossed alchemy, if you will.

At worst, Sooley's pictures can be a little like illustrations from a seed catalogue or a rather flat seaside postcard. (There is something of a nostalgic glow to the colour images, especially of Prospect Cottage itself.) But others are remarkable indeed. Some of his flower close-ups harness the same horticultural eroticism as the brilliant Robert Mapplethorpe (another Queer artist who succumbed to AIDS). Largely black and white, the sculptures are thrilling, dazzling images that allow the reader to look at Jarman's garden anew. They bolster rather than detract from the belief that within these twists of metal, sea-washed driftwood and stone circles the film-maker was a white witch, attempting to somehow harness magickal energies. Nothing could be further from the truth: "It did have magic - the magic of surprise, the treasure hunt."

Jarman's text also comes as something of a surprise. Gone are the angry pronouncements of his other books, the Queer manifestos; absent indeed the righteous ire that drove his final huge headlines and bark-thick oils. By this point he was in and out of hospital, fleeing to Dungeness with his lover HB (who provides the introduction) and Sooley to work on his precious garden; this is the last testament of a gardener rather than a politicised artist. At one point he talks about being in Edinburgh when the AIDS quilt comes to town and his attendance out of "a sense of duty". "I shall haunt anyone who ever makes a panel for me," he writes.

He turned the place into his best film - the bitter, passionate, ultimately elegiac visual poetry of The Garden - but is dissatisfied by artistic responses to the disease. (The Michael Gough-recited poem from the film is included in here.) He all but dismisses the work as somehow inadequate.

But in the end all of that is secondary to a paean to a place and people this extraordinary man loved best. It is suffused with a calmness and a mischievousness seldom seen in his work. He appears occasionally in the pictures, getting progressively more frail, making a final visit to Monet's garden at Giverny. The image of him on the bridge, stoic and obviously dying, says almost more than his words. One senses that, given half a chance, he would rather have removed himself altogether and let us see more of this beautiful place.