Garden Guru: Southern spring

Larnach Castle will host food, wine and beer tastings as part of the annual Dunedin Rhododendron Festival. Photo / Supplied

If you think the link between rhododendrons, asparagus, seaweed and golf is a tad tenuous, then you obviously haven't travelled to Dunedin in spring. The annual Dunedin Rhododendron Festival opens today and runs for a week, featuring a range of events.

The host of one of those events, food writer and teacher Judith Cullen, lives high above the beach at St Clair, and is anxiously willing on a crop of lush asparagus spears.

She runs a cookery school from home, after selling up a successful cafe in the city. And though lashed with occasional salt spray, this modest, steeply sloping section has been turned into a productive potager. It yields all the Mediterranean staples, which seem naturally adapted to coastal living and lend themselves to the sort of fresh, seasonal recipes that Judith adores.

Protective walls shelter espaliered fruit trees including quince for use in sauces and jellies. Rocket is always on hand to throw into salads or garnish pizzas. Florence fennel is a speciality, too - it reminds Judith of her beloved Italy where she takes cookery tours each year. Batches are sown at both ends of the summer and the mild aniseed flavour of the celery-like bases is an ideal accompaniment to salads, chicken and fish.

But it's the asparagus she reckons will be the star player in the lunch classes dished up to the paying foodies at the festival over the next week.

Even nearer the surf, another group of adventurous gastronomists will be out in their gumboots searching for unconventional ingredients with which they can cook up a storm. "Sea vegetables" is the fancy new name for kelp and all that other slimy stuff you find clinging to rocks and driftwood at low tide.

It seems seaweed as food - like wild mushrooms and truffles - is the latest word in foraged tucker providing you identify it correctly and don't poison yourself. Sally Carson will be leading small forays along the coast on behalf of the Marine Studies Centre. Back at base, Sally is a dab hand at turning unpromising slime into nutritious seaweed and chocolate chip cookies or crispy kelp chips. A completely renewable food, seaweed is packed with vitamins and essential iodine.

Across town on the Otago Golf Course, more plants - and one type in particular - are taking the stage for the same glorious week. The annual Rhododendron Golf Tournament sees some frenzied slices, hooks and dodgy putting all for a good cause on a course which, it's claimed, is the birthplace of the sport in New Zealand.

For decades, rhododendrons have been donated, begged and borrowed to be planted along the fairways and around the greens, making a spectacular show in spring and no doubt swallowing up innumerable quantities of wayward balls for the rest of the year.

As well as coming to see the horticultural sideshow, participants arrive hoping to scoop up one of the many prizes on offer - all of which just happen to be rhododendrons, too.

It's these show-off Himalayan shrubs that are, in fact, the reason most of Dunedin will be buzzing with all manner of plant-related events.

Global warming means that New Zealand's oldest large-scale garden event, Dunedin's 26th Rhododendron Festival, has shifted forward in the calendar and kicks off today.

With its light, acidic soils - and cool, wet climate - Dunedin is the ideal place for these juggernauts of the gardening world. Originally the festival centred on the city's botanic gardens with their amazing "dell", where some 3500 rhododendrons strut and jostle over a decadent 6ha site.

Guided tours of the dell are still popular, but festival co-ordinator Victoria Bunton explains that, although rhododendrons remain very much at the heart of the event, the festival organisers are kept on their toes thinking up original ways to appeal to the wider community. Hence the seaweed forays and golf, not to mention botanical breakfasts, talks, tours, gallery openings and a photographic competition in which all entries must contain at least one rhododendron.

Gardens and plants naturally lend themselves to creative pursuits. Although there will be outdoor painting classes in some gardens over the week, a less formal encounter with art is held each year at Glenfalloch Woodland Garden, where you can paint pots and see them fired in the raku kiln as you listen to music, picnic and wander amid the outdoor art installations on show.

"Glenfalloch is always a magnet for families. It's just the sort of thing we want to be doing more of to attract the young," says Victoria, who at 27 is naturally keen to demolish the presupposition that garden visiting is only for little old ladies. The rising interest in food - both growing and devouring it - has been an obvious tangent to head along. Among the selection of garden safaris one enterprising garden centre holds its own dedicated "vege tour", taking in three private properties where the owners are especially passionate about produce.

The rhodos may take a back seat occasionally but Dunedin is keeping up with the times for it has realised that great gardens are not bubble-wrapped curiosities only to be peered at by the rarefied few, but rather launch pads of enjoyment, whether it be sport, art, eating, music or just lying back and switching off.

The 26th Dunedin Rhododendron Festival, October 18-26. www.rhododunedin.co.nz or for a programme, contact Victoria Bunton info@rhododunedin.co.nz

COULD DO THIS WEEK

* Forget-me-not is the cheerful blue biennial that can carpet the ground of gardens at this time of year but can swamp plants and rather take over. So before it sets seed, make time to reduce clumps and check its spread - it pulls out easily.

* Climbers such as the wongawonga vine (Pandorea pandorana) and winter jasmines need a drastic haircut now they have flowered so they can make fresh flowering wood for next year.

* Spray lawns if badly affected with broadleaf weeds with a selective lawn weedkiller before the weather becomes too warm.

* As vegetable seedlings expand in cell trays transfer out into the vegetable garden, taking care to protect your transplants from snails and slugs.