Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was an English artist, filmmaker, set designer, diarist, author, and gardener. After attending King's College London and the Slade School of Art, he began a career as a painter. As a set designer, he worked on such productions as The Royal Ballet's Jazz Calendar (1968) and The English National Opera's production of Don Giovanni (1968), as well as a number of films. In the early 1970s, Jarman began a series of filmworks made with Super 8, followed by his first full-length feature film, Sebastiane , in 1975. He went on to make ten more feature films, among them the famous experimental Caravaggio (1986) and The Garden (1990). His final feature, Blue , was first shown at the Biennale Arte, Venice, in June 1993, seven months before his death. Michael Charlesworth is a professor of art history at the University of Texas at Austin, teaching nineteenth-century European painting and photography. Specializing in interdisciplinary approaches, he has in recent years written the first full-length study of Reginald Farrer, the early twentieth-century plant collector, gardener, writer, watercolor painter, and Buddhist, and a critical life of Derek Jarman.

He has published articles on early photography, the picturesque, and eighteenth-century panoramic drawing, as well as scholarly articles on the gardens of Stourhead, Rievaulx Terrace, and Wentworth Castle. His interdisciplinary study Landscape and Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France was published in 2008. Over the past two years, Charlesworth has been writing a second book project about Derek Jarman while living in a small wooden house in Austin, Texas, built in 1917, with a small garden around it.