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Gardens | <strong>Magazine</strong> 51<br />
“Violet describes her gardening influences as a materialsled<br />
mixtape of textures, colours and feelings.”<br />
BUILDING A POND<br />
My fascination with water in a garden goes way back.<br />
Tiny me couldn’t keep away from water and found the water lillies in the Timaru<br />
Botanic Gardens pond completely magical and exotic. I wanted to take a piece home – a<br />
compulsion I often have when looking at beautiful gardens and landscapes. My pockets are<br />
well used and grubby with the seed heads, blooms or what mum called ‘heels’ that have<br />
made their way in there.<br />
I dream (literally and figuratively) of having water in my garden deep enough to bathe in.<br />
I made my first permanent pond for my mother around age 16. It was concrete and I<br />
decorated it with vintage ceramic pieces. A wishing well came soon after – a small, deep,<br />
sculpted concrete basin sunk into one of mum’s rock gardens.<br />
When flatting in Christchurch I made another small pond/bog garden. From memory it<br />
was unlined and constantly drained … There were also two cast-iron baths with claw feet<br />
outdoors – one with lilies and fish and the other a fire bath (a bathtub with a fire under it<br />
to heat the water) for humans.<br />
In our first home I built a small pond in the courtyard, with broken Edwardian china<br />
mosaics decorating the lip. The wee ones would play in it.<br />
Concrete ponds are sometimes problematic because tree roots can disrupt them and<br />
compromise the structural integrity. I was always patching leaks and cracks in the one I<br />
made for mum.
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