Every garden can be a voyage of discovery and surprise

One of the downsides of our devotion to professionally designed gardens during the past few years is that just about everything we do is carefully planned and executed.
The garden is styled to suit the architecture of the house, the planting is carefully orchestrated, the elements of hard landscaping are logical and well constructed, and even the garden sculptures are meticulously placed.
So the opportunities for walking around the garden and being confronted by something completely unexpected are seriously limited in the modern day landscape.
Our garden is neither professionally designed nor carefully planned; in fact, much of our time in recent weeks has been spent undoing the mistakes of the past and striving for a bit of logic. But having said that, it is full of surprises, which is an added bonus at this time of the year.
The proliferation of gorse, moth plant, tobacco weed, ginger and wattle are surprises we could well have done without, although I have to confess to a guilty affection for the last two. I was born and bred in Dunedin, where wattles were prized in the garden for their lush, feathery foliage and fuzzy yellow flowers, and the scent of wild ginger was enough to send you to heaven.
But those are not the sort of surprises I mean. The felling of two badly placed olive trees and an accidental coppice of over-height, under-weight Tasmanian blackwoods the other day revealed a shrubby thing I don't even remember planting. That was a surprise in itself, but even better was that after a few days of exposure to the sunlight, it burst forth with a perfectly formed, perfectly round, white powder puff flower as big as a tennis ball. We were gobsmacked.
I guessed it to be a Calliandra, because I'd bought a couple of pink ones from subtropical guru Russell Fransham years ago and they are flourishing elsewhere in the garden.
Russell describes Calliandra as an elegant, softly rounded shrub or small tree from Bolivia which is usually called the powderpuff bush because of its hot-pink, fluffy pompom flowers.
He says that in the wild the flower is blood-red but in cultivation it can be red, pink or white. The white ones usually start flowering in June, but mine is obviously confused, having been submerged under the blackwoods for the past three years.
One of the nicest Calliandras is haematocephala. It's lush, with bigger, brighter flowers and it'll grow three or four metres if you let it. A cut-back after flowering will keep it nice and bushy - they have a tendency to go leggy otherwise.
The bright pink flower buds look a bit like raspberries, and new buds keep developing from the same flower spurs throughout the flowering season so that as one pink pompom collapses another one is opening in its place.
Having kept mine, albeit inadvertently, under wraps, I now know the Calliandra needs full sun, shelter from frost and wind, and good drainage. Two out of three in my garden allowed it to survive, and by adding the third - sun - it has provided this fabulous autumnal surprise.
Even the foliage is gorgeous. At the moment, the feathery leaves are deep green, but I'm told that when the new leaves emerge they'll be coppery pink, providing another surprise.
Now I'm on a mission to find out what else is tucked under some of my more opportunistic trees.
A grevillea is surviving beautifully alongside (and partly underneath) a rampant vibernum, and I know there are orchids that I've slung into the undergrowth after flowering to be rediscovered when the new season starts.
I'll add some bromeliads, because they're very good at surprising you with their weird flowers when you least expect it, and I'll also tuck some bits of garden sculpture and found art in among plants that'll die off in the winter so there'll be something in the gap to make me smile.
Then every excursion around this unplanned, unstructured, poorly orchestrated wilderness will be a voyage of discovery.
TOP TIPS
* This is a great time for planting orchard and other trees, but make sure they get a good start.
* Remove the tree from its bag and soak it in a bucket of water for at least an hour before planting.
* Dig the planting hole as deep as the roots of the plant and twice as wide.
* Tip the bucket of water into the hole. If it disappears immediately you may need more structure to the soil. If it's still there after you've had a cuppa, make sure that whatever you are planting will survive with wet feet.
* Stake your new trees and give them some initial protection from the wind.