SOIL, MOSS, AND PRIMROSE
Violet is an impatient gardener—an oxymoronic phrase—she drags huge potted plants to empty spaces in her garden so she can see the change in real time. A tree planted behind can have its time to mature and grow, but, for now, the potted placeholder stands tall and creates the desired silhouette. Sometimes, she even pries a bud open so it will bloom quicker.
She is wearing a woollen jumper, fawn, with moments of cinnamon, and corduroy pants. We are sitting in her front room. I am on an antique couch, shrouded in fur—I ask if it is a yak—she excitedly confirms.
She opens a drawer and takes out a record of her singing, pressed with a photograph of her in her bedroom when she was twenty-something. Aspirational.
The room is full-to-the-brim with carefully placed furniture, most is one-hundred-year-old-plus rimu or kauri, draped with hand-loomed blankets, and hundreds of books. On a shelf, a heavy, silver Loving Cup stands beside a black and white photo of her father in his thirties. A patchwork of Persian rugs covers every millimetre of carpet. On the mantelpiece, a small, wooden-framed darkroom print of a huge Victorian house, called The Old Barton, takes centre stage. This is where Violet grew up, in Timaru, and where her mother lived until she was ninety. It was also where, in her small upstairs bedroom, the “old maid’s room”, she made an indoor garden (of soil, moss, and primrose) on the carpet, which she dutifully watered. The water soaked the carpet and dripped through the floorboards into the room downstairs.
Violet tells me her birth name—Bridget Charlotte Tilley Faigan—and explains why she goes by ‘Violet’. The New Zealand accent rendered the name ‘Bridget’ into a hilarious-to-her-peers mess while she lived in Bath, England, and attended school there for a term, during one of the many trips abroad with her mother growing up. Sometimes, these trips began and ended with a slow (but free) boat journey across to the other side of the world, in lieu of a plane-ride. In exchange for the boat passage, Violet’s industrious mother, Gladys, was the ship’s Doctor. At their various destinations, Violet and her siblings would stay in wonky cottages powered with coin-operated electricity.
We live four minutes walk from each other, it does not take me long to bound down the hill to hers. From the top of the street I can see a mature tree on her berm. This tree is etched with the initials of Violet and her children. She leaves the gate and the front door open.
Violet’s garden’s extension to the street’s berm recently resulted in a stern Dunedin City Council letter. She has charmed them though; the berm remains. She stands up and points to the back of her garden, past the pond, to a dormant-looking plant (to the untrained eye, i.e., mine). The next time I come over, this will be filled with big, white flowers that look like droopy handkerchiefs.
The regal bed of heavy turned wood is shrouded in clothing. Around the corner, in a sunroom connected to the bedroom, there are two full racks of clothes: beaded Edwardian gowns, velvet blazers, and white Victorian cotton dresses. Violet owned and ran vintage stores in Dunedin. Most recently, it was the Preservation Society, which had its last day of trading in 2018, after being open for fifteen years. I would go to this store before a film at the Rialto Cinema with my mum; we would coo over the shaggy sheepskin-covered chairs and the deer taxidermy.
Violet tells me about how she knocks down a wall to make a bigger room, beginning moments after having the idea to do so. She will move a heavy couch from one room to another. She mixes her own colours to paint the walls. She taught herself to tile the bathroom while doing it. The house is always in a state of flux. Objects arrive in piles, and move around the house, or leave: sold, gifted, or donated. An honesty box on the street mans a stall of plants for sale.