Everybody knows what Bougainvillea looks like - bright and colourful, and synonymous with tropical climes. They come in white, various shades of pink, peach, red and purple, and a shrub in full bloom is truly spectacular.
There are lots of varieties in my mum’s garden - I remember them being hatched as cuttings forty plus years ago, and they are now huge with woody trunks and very well established - I can only imagine how deep the roots go if someone actually wanted to take them out one day. One was even planted alongside a mahogany tree, and has grown right up to the top of the now huge tree, and when it’s flowering, the vibrant pink cascading down the green of the mahogany tree is truly incredible.
Bougainvillea also comes in doubles (see the first photo in this blog), where flowers have twice the number of sepals, and there are also dwarf varieties, which are very cute with their miniature flowers, miniature leaves and miniature size, though I have seen one of these grow into a very large bush six or more feet tall.
For those of you who don’t already know, Bougainvillea also comes with vicious thorns. If you’re trimming one, gloves are a good idea though the thorns can pierce those too. As a child growing up, I was always told that the thorns were poisonous. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that if you get stuck by one it is very painful. For this reason, people like to use Bougainvillea from a security point of view too. No one is going to push their way through a Bougainvillea hedge to get into your yard. Some gardeners will even refuse to deal with them because they are so difficult to trim. But they make up for all of the negatives by being so beautiful and dramatic.
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