Garden Guru: Sunburst confetti

As low sunlight catches golden leaves they glow like stained glass. Photo / Supplied

I happily admit to being a grumpy old codger, so I am dubious when my wife suggests I take my boys on a treat to celebrate the change of seasons.

So here I am uneasily tailing my boys who are attempting to shove autumn leaves in each other's mouths on a stranger's lovingly manicured lawn.

Kids and gardens are an uneasy mix. In my own yard, I would have them locked up or at least tethered to prevent them from rolling on a treasured plant. But here I let them wrestle. We've paid our money, after all.

A few years back you could visit any garden like this in autumn (check out the Garden Trust's website www.gardens.org.nz for ideas) and guarantee yourself the most peaceful three hours of your year. But things are changing.

I had decided to revisit a place I went to just five months ago. Most New Zealanders can't comprehend why you'd go back to visit a garden in the same decade you last saw it, let alone return more than once in the same year - especially in autumn.

A few years ago the concept and nuances of seasonal change were lost on us Jafas sweating in our winterless north. Spring was the official time you did gardens and for the rest of the year anything leafy was out of bounds or in the salad bowl. Thus, in the old days, October and November became a sort of crazed horticultural overdose.

While Maggie Barry pumped out the overtime on TV, the Trinity festival - that behemoth of garden safaris - clogged up Auckland's infrastructure with its sea of hats and dodgy drivers, running back-to-back with the Ellerslie Flower Show. If you were lucky you'd fit in a two-day window and take a plane down to Marlborough to listen to a New York flower arranger who had once done a wedding for Mick Jagger. Only the show-off slipped in a brief stop off for the Rhodos garden in Taranaki, too. No wonder we'd all had our fill of gardens by the 90s, when numbers attending this great gardening spring circus began to plummet.

But, suddenly, it seems we have discovered that gardens - the good ones at least - have a shelf life. You can visit them in summer or autumn, even winter with the right footwear. Out-of- season gardens are peaceful, arguably as they should be. And if the owners know their stuff there will be something to surprise you every time you turn out to poke your nose in a flower and peer through a window, even though the leaflet told you explicitly not to.

Garden visiting year round is in, and the reason I reckon, is what I pseudo-scientifically call "The Ellerslie Shift". You see, when the Ellerslie Flower Show upped and moved south, it skipped forward a few months in the calendar and broke the spring deadlock. The end of summer suddenly became the new time to take up the trowel. It makes sense. After a summer basking, bathing and generally sitting around, as the weather cools and the soil goes moist ready for planting, the plants come back to life. Far from autumn being a deathbed of decay, it can be more a melting pot of new life.

In Auckland, gay and lesbian gardeners - involved in the annual Heroic Gardens Festival - have been bucking the trend for years, trying to wrestle us from our addiction to spring. It's high summer when their bromeliad-crammed enclaves look their best and finally, it seems, we have caught on.

Visitor numbers for the long-running Heroic Gardens Festival were up 57 per cent this year. An estimated 17,000 of us were out and about on a garden safari, ogling at expensive art, murky water features and funky foliage. The event raised more than $51,000 for Hospice - not bad for a weekend's work.

And, really, there was no reason to put the car and map away in March, either. And in May, good gardens still have plenty of tricks up their unravelling sleeves. While many of summer's show offs are blazing on, from dahlias to brightly coloured exotics, others are just starting out.

But topping it all come the leaves. Catching the lower slant of the sun and throwing it back like stained glass, leaves are the confetti of the season, transforming even the drabbest bit of suburbia and imbuing it with a sense of carnival. So swish them, roll in them - rake them, rot them. You can shove them in your friends' mouths for all I care - works for my kids - but just don't miss out, somewhere nearby there's a golden garden open today.

Could do this week

* Continue to move or plant trees and shrubs - evergreens especially - as doing it in spring leaves them very susceptible to drought.

* Apply a moss and weed killer to the lawn and a week later scarify to remove the dead moss and let in air.

* Plant strawberries now in well-prepared soil with plenty of compost or better; manure dug in. They enjoy good drainage and an acid soil. Mulching the plants with pine needles is said to improve the flavour but any mulch will keep the fruits free of dirt splashes.

* Dolomite helps to break up heavy soils - it also releases nutrients trapped in the ground such as potassium and phosphorous as it raises the pH. Apply a light dressing (60-90g for each square metre) to bare areas of the vegetable garden.

* Weed around winter crops such as leeks, cabbage and parsnips.

* Sow broad beans in double rows so they support one another. A light, friable soil is best in plenty of sunshine.