Wild and magical – Violet’s Dunedin garden

A new book of New Zealand gardens ditches all the usual manicured show stoppers and steps into 12 charming and idiosyncratic sections, including a romantic garden in the suburbs of Dunedin where its creator leaves the weeds and lets the flowers wither, seed and die .

Atop a hill on the outskirts of Dunedin sits 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 a considered connection with its neighbors.

Violet describes her gardening influences as a mixtape of materials, colors and feelings: the bright warm flowers set against a dark background on her childhood eiderdown quilt, the wooded Sussex countryside painted in blocks of color by Ivon Hitchens from his caravan home, Victorian block printed wallpapers, summer horse rides through dusty yarrow and cow parsley tracks.

When Violet and her husband Malcolm bought their Dunedin home in 2012, their daughters Clara and Emerald were still young, so Violet was keen to start a vegetable garden. The house was gray with a gray roof, net curtains, a square rose garden with a few neglected inhabitants, some bushes above it, and a straggly pittosporum hedge that separated the property from the road. But the section was bigger than she’d had before, and Violet knew that this would be her ‘forever garden’. He could see beyond the chip of bark layered over the black polyethylene, and he appreciated the idea of ​​unleashing his potential.

With the vegetable patch started, the pittosporum hedge came out and went to the main border, now the sunniest, most abundant garden. Most of the trees are also gone, retaining only a smoke bush and a pollard maple, and that area is now a woodland garden. Where the black polyethylene once dominated is now the shadowy border or “spooky bed”.

During the Covid-19 lockdowns, a pond was dug to replace the rose garden. Most of the roses were gone, and besides, Violet could never make sense of roses being planted all together just because they are roses.

Apart from a small greenhouse, the back garden was bare lawn. The neighborhood’s discarded greenhouse was connected to the existing one, and Violet excavated the space to lay a terracotta floor. He now has a nursery area where he grows plants for his own garden and to sell from a street stall. Vegetable beds and flower beds are slowly developing into the ever-evolving lawn space. He also planted the grass berm in front, so that the garden extends beyond the property, blurring the boundary of public-private space and providing pleasure to passers-by.

Most of the soil is heavy clay, with the exception of a few loamy patches that Violet assumes are plant fragments from days gone by. It was carefully soiled with compost and mulch. His favorite mulch is pea straw – for its insulating qualities and the “silkiness” it adds to the soil as it breaks down.

Don’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 green belt, the property is largely sheltered, but the wind does get through at times. Snowy winters and generally short mild summers mean everything Violet plants must be quite hardy.

I don’t tend to plan much, just the odd sketch that is rarely followed. Violet gardens intuitively, developing each little space as the mood brings: a bog garden, a shady garden, a drought garden, a fanciously moory pond. Part of that is trying to have the right plant in the right place so you don’t waste resources and water. She is always ready to move a plant if it is not thriving, or looks out of place.

Perennials are Violet’s specialty. Often considered more challenging to grow and with less immediate 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 their perennials for extra texture, as well as “weeds” like wild parsnip and thistle. The seeds of thistle (Dipsacus fullonum) were collected on the side of a road in Central Otago, and wild black mullein (Verbascum nigrum) on the banks of a river.

In the winter, he allows his plants to seed and die right away, opting to support their natural processes rather than “cleaning”. He likes its branching stems and dew webs glistening in the frost.

Violet always has a list of plants she is looking for that are hard to find. He recently collaborated with his gardener friend Susie Ripley to import a collection of perennial seeds. Susie runs a garden shop and online business, so she handled the import logistics, and together they sourced 40 perennial varieties that they couldn’t find in Aotearoa. They included the feather poppy (Macleaya microcarpa), with large, geometrically intricate flat leaves and plumes of puffy white flowers, and Korean campanula (Campanula takeimana), with a dusty pink canopy of drooping bell-shaped flowers. Violet painted botanical illustrations for seed packets that could be equally suitable for a manual of witchcraft pharmacology or a Dries Van Noten track textile.

Gardens are self-portraits. Violet still works alone on her. It’s indulgent and creative and there’s really no room for other people’s input. Her events in the open garden are a way to share the joy, however, and she is known among friends for always being late for dinner, but always arriving with an armful of flowers.

Violet hopes her self-portrait is a little eccentric and idiosyncratic, with her foraged weeds and palette of oxblood, biscuit browns and butter. She sees gardeners as musicians or readers: diverse and very personal in their tastes and fixations.

If I had to offer advice to other gardeners, it would be to make bold choices, and to trust themselves.