A new book of New Zealand gardens bypasses all the usual groomed show-stoppers and steps inside 12 enchanting and idiosyncratic sections, including a romantic garden in Dunedin's suburbs where its creator leaves the weeds and let's the flowers wither, seed and die.
On a hilltop in suburban Dunedin is Violet’s Garden, an ever evolving collage of botanical curiosities, foraged weeds and rare flowering perennials. In the 10 years she has gardened here, Violet has created numerous gardens, including a woodland area, a planted berm, vegetable patches, a bog garden and a shade garden. Each is distinct but exists in considered connection to its neighbours.
Violet describes her gardening influences as a materials-led mixtape of textures, colours and feelings: the warm bright flowers set against a dark background on her childhood eiderdown quilt, the Sussex woodland countryside painted in blocks of colour by Ivon Hitchens from his home caravan, Victorian block-printed wallpapers, summer horse rides through dusty tracks of yarrow and cow parsley.
When Violet and her husband Malcolm bought their Dunedin house in 2012 their daughters Clara and Emerald were still young, so Violet prioritised getting a vegetable garden started. The house was grey with a grey roof, net curtains, a square rose garden with a few neglected inhabitants, some overgrown shrubs, and a straggly pittosporum hedge separating the property from the street. But the section was bigger than any she’d had before, and Violet knew that this would be her ‘forever garden’. She could see past the bark chip layered over black polythene, and relished the idea of releasing its potential.
With the vegetable patch started, out came the pittosporum hedge and in went the main border, now the sunniest, most abundant garden. Most of the shrubs came out too, retaining just a smoke bush and a pollarded maple, and that area is now a woodland garden. Where black polythene once dominated is now the shady border or ‘spooky bed’.
During Covid- 19 lockdowns a pond was dug to replace the rose garden. Most of the roses were past it, and besides, Violet could never make sense of roses being planted all together just because they’re roses.
Aside from a little glasshouse, the back garden was bare lawn. The neighbour’s discarded glasshouse has now been connected to the existing one, and Violet dug out the floor space to lay down a terracotta tiled floor. She now has a nursery area where she raises plants for her own garden and to sell from a street-side stall. The vegetable beds and flower beds are slowly expanding into the lawn space, ever evolving. She has also planted the grass berm out front, so that the garden extends beyond the property, blurring the public–private space boundary and providing enjoyment for passers- by.
Most of the soil is heavy clay, with the exception of a few loamy patches that Violet supposes are vegetable patches from times gone by. She has been painstakingly breaking up the clay with compost and mulch. Her preferred mulch is pea straw — for its insulating qualities and the ‘silkiness’ it adds to the soil as it breaks down.
She doesn’t introduce anything inorganic into the garden — just homemade compost and seaweed tonic, or a little neem oil spray. On the hill above Dunedin’s greenbelt, the property is largely sheltered but the wind does whip through sometimes. Snowy winters and generally short mild summers mean everything Violet plants needs to be fairly hardy.
She doesn’t tend to plan much, just the odd sketch that is seldom followed. Violet gardens intuitively, developing each little area as the mood takes her: a bog garden, a shade garden, a drought garden, a fancifully moory pond. Part of this is trying to have the right plant in the right place so that she’s not wasting resources and water. She’s always ready to move a plant if it is not thriving, or looks out of place.
Perennials are Violet’s specialisation. Often considered more challenging to grow and with less instant reward than annuals, perennials grow, seed and die, then repeat this process the following year. Grasses that are not officially ornamental — oats, rye, barley — grow among her perennials for extra texture, as well as ‘weeds’ such as wild parsnip and thistle. Teasel seeds (Dipsacus fullonum) have been harvested from a Central Otago roadside, and wild black mullein (Verbascum nigrum) from a riverbank.
In winter she allows her plants to seed and die right down, opting to support their natural processes rather than ‘tidy up’. She enjoys their twiggy stems and the dewy spiderwebs glittering in the frost.
Violet always has a list of plants she’s looking for that are hard to find. Recently she collaborated with her gardener friend Susie Ripley to import a collection of perennial seeds. Susie runs a garden shop and online retail business, so she managed the importing logistics, and together they sourced 40 perennial varieties they had not been able to find in Aotearoa. They included plume poppy (Macleaya microcarpa), with large flat intricately geometric leaves and puffy white flower plumes, and Korean bellflower (Campanula takesimana), with a dusty pink canopy of hanging bell- shaped blooms. Violet painted botanical illustrations for the seed packets that might be equally appropriate for a witchcraft pharmacology manual or a Dries Van Noten runway textile.
Gardens are self- portraits. Violet always works alone on hers. It’s indulgent and creative and there’s not really space for others’ input. Her open-garden events are a way to share the joy, though, and she’s known among friends for always being late to dinner parties, but always arriving with an armful of flowers.
Violet hopes her self-portrait is a little eccentric and idiosyncratic, with its foraged weeds and palette of ox blood, biscuity browns and butter. She sees gardeners as being like musicians or readers: diverse and deeply personal in their tastes and fixations.
If she were to offer any advice to other gardeners, it would be to make bold choices, and to trust themselves.
SHARE ME