Artist, jewellery maker and lifelong gardener Violet Faigan, her partner Malcolm Deans and their daughters Clara, 14, and Emerald, 12, live in a Victorian villa with a naturalistic garden in the Dunedin suburb of Belleknowes.
When did you move here and what was the property like when you arrived? We moved here in 2010. What had been a considered planting of specimen trees and shrubs had become leggy and overgrown. There was a neglected rose garden, no perennial planting and a pittosporum hedge along the street front that occupied the sunniest position on the property.
I removed the rose bed and this area is now the pond. The shrubbery has been radically thinned – a cotinus and
