B for Bougainvillea

Oh yes, learn that spelling!

All over my city, as the sun blazes, Bougainvillea are running riot, scrambling up trees, and filling the skies with colour - orange, pink and white.  Their joy is tumbling over the city's walls, cascading down from terraces, making the dreariest of buildings look bright and pretty.

My favourite used to be the ones lining the walls of the Olcott school on Besant Avenue, and they were a traffic-stopping riot, quite literally.  Motorists would stop to take pictures and selfies.

Neighbouring Pondy is even better.  All through the French Quarter, the yellow walls, blue doors and pink bougainvillea make for great compositions.

An Ikebana composition in nature - brown lines and masses of pink

Through a large portion of the year, we don't give them a second look - thorny vines, with regular small heart-shaped leaves, with a few flowers here and there.  Come summer however and they thrive like no other.

They actually need good sunshine and very little water!  No wonder they do well in our summers, even though they have come from south America.

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And all those pretty colours are actually modified leaves - bracts.  Those little whites are the flowers, and trios of them are usually surrounded by these papery, colourful bracts.

In the right foreground are the buds before they open into those pretty flowers.

Let me see what unusual colours I spot this summer.