[ Lost in the Landscape ]

double bougainvilleas

One of the plea­sures of a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia garden–if you have the space–is the abil­ity to grow bougainvil­leas. From my deck I can see that the neigh­bors to the north and east have some, as do the neigh­bors two doors down to the south. It’s one of the plants that defines a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia gar­den. They’re com­mon as dirt, but a lot more charismatic.

My gar­den has two vari­eties that we put in over ten years ago. I unfor­tu­nately don’t know their names–This is before I started my data­base of plant names, and their orig­i­nal labels are long gone. But they’re a com­ple­men­tary pair of double-flowered vari­eties, a magenta-pink vari­ety, and a white vari­ety that is flushed the same pink tone at the edge of its bracts.

This is how the two plants look grow­ing together. Bare wall, or frothy mass of pink flow­ers on a plant that requires almost no water and the occa­sional prun­ing? It was an easy deci­sion for us.

One of the down-sides of these plants is what hap­pens with the bracts once the plant has fin­ished flow­er­ing. On the single-flowered vari­eties, they can drop off and make a thick pile of mulch–or mess to clean up, depend­ing on where the plant is. One neigh­bor has their plant next to their swim­ming pool, a place­ment deci­sion that cre­ates a cer­tain amount of extra maintenance.

On the double-flowered ver­sions, the dead bracts tend to hang on to the plant and look a lit­tle less than glam­orous. Here’s a pro­gres­sion from new, to less-than-new, to faded bracts on my plant. You can cut them off, if the brown both­ers you. But the plant is putting out new flow­ers most of the year, so there’s plenty of dis­trac­tion away from the brown.

We South­ern Cal­i­for­ni­ans may be lack­ing the fiery trans­for­ma­tion of our trees as fall sets in, but we’re cer­tainly not with­out our gar­den color.

October 27 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bougainvilleas • drought-tolerant landscaping | 1 Comment »