| Bougainvillea - Any excuse for color |
By Catherine Krantz
For me Mexico has always been about color. The colors of the crafts and fabrics, the colors of the murals and the architecture. And of course the natural colors. The million blues and greens of the ocean, the reds and pinks and purples of the sunsets whose beauty always catch you by surprise. The colors of the mountains and the trees with all the bright birds and butterflies. Here in the tropics especially, the lush colors can sometimes be beautiful to the point of overwhelming with so many wonders to gaze upon it’s a wonder we aren’t just perpetually distracted. What distracts and delights me the most are the flowers and the flowering plants. It seems almost impossible that flowers so large or so colorful could exist in anything but a manic depressive expressionist’s globby oil paintings…but they do, in profuse amounts. The window that I stare out of, when I’m supposed to be editing articles, looks directly out onto a large arch of the biggest yellow flowers I’ve ever seen in my life. Bigger than your hand and so many of them they just fall off and litter the driveway. It seems a crime to not rush right out and pick them up, I must shut the curtains to get any work done at all. Having just shut the curtains, I’m thinking now is as good a time as any to start a series on tropical flowers, but as luck would have it, I don’t actually know anything about tropical flowers. I don’t even know the name of the big yellow ones that seem to be distracting me all over the place around here.
So I guess I’ll have to do some research. We’ll start with the beautiful bougainvillea because bougainvilleas are synonymous with tropical beauty and it seems no matter where you go in Mexico, you can always find them. In pots on balconies or bushes as tall as houses, the colors come in a seeming endless variety of hues. From every shade of pink and red to multicolored varieties that have both. Purples and lavenders from the very pale to the shocking and whites and even oranges too. My favorites are the purples but Zihuatanejo is literally covered in the deep red/fuchsia variety. (An interesting note is that the big showy splash of color isn’t actually the flower, it’s a set of bracts, or modified leaves, that enclose and hide the small flowers.)
Bougainvillea is the common name for the flowering woody vines, family name Four-O’Clocks or Nyctaginaceae, that are native to South America and cultivated in Mexico and the southern United States. They are named for the French navigator, scientist and military officer, Louis de Bougainville (1729-1811), who is known for his important contributions to science and geography during the last half of the 18th century.
Bouganvilleas are native to tropical regions and flourish here year round but are available all across the southern US or by mail order through many internet tropical plant sellers.
If you want to take a memory of Zihuatanejo back home with you, plant a bougainvillea in your garden. Bougainvilleas do well in most temperate or moderate climates but do need to be protected or green housed from freezing weather in colder climates. In colder climates they will be perennials or returning perennials.
The secret is well-drained soil and full or near full sunlight. Bougainvilleas don’t do well with over watering –which is why they do better here after the rainy season. After a thorough watering at planting, always let the soil dry out before re-watering. Flowering occurs following flushes of new growth. Feeding and tip pruning should be done at the end of each bloom cycle. Several blooming cycles can be expected yearly if there is good drainage, full sun and moderate fertilization. The bougainvillea is a vining plant that can be trained to grow over walls or kept snipped short to be in pots. Frequent pruning can keep them as shrubs and will not stop flower production. To encourage longer growth, keep them trained and snip back the longest shoots to about two feet.
I have heard that bougainvilleas can be a challenge to grow outside of tropical climates, but the research sounds encouraging and what better way to bring a little bit of Zihua home with you.
And I just might have to go buy some myself, any excuse for color and the big yellow guy out the window could use some competition.
October 2001
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