The Bougie Bracts
My Eureka Moment is on its way
As we slowly emerge from a series of three consecutive lockdowns, restricted movements, lost walks into sunrises & drives around sunsets, rainy cloud covered super flower moon nights, bird songs on the other side of the bedroom windows, sniffing the noon air from the balcony, overworked, jobless, overslept netflix film criticism, I have grown closer to a shade of orange-red of a Bougainvillea.
I have no clue if these belong to B. spectabilis, B. glabra, or a natural hybrid. That is for another more researched post. Until then, this paper here has a few answers for the time being.
Someone I recently followed on twitter referred to them as bougie. Bougie, short for Bougainvillea, one more permutation to the long list of names, misspelled and otherwise. But it makes me giggle everytime I see them after. That name has found a nook in my vocabulary.
A recurring memory is a view from my aunt's porch into her neighbour's garden. They had lined the narrow path from the main gate to their front door with different colours of the bougie spaced out evenly so the canopies never touched each other even while in full bloom. Every summer in the month of May that path transformed into this vibrant colourful space with rounded mini canopies, or in shapes visualized by their gardener. My perch at her house was on that broad railing. It still is though the neighbours have quit growing those two rows of colour.
The Bougainvillea has three flowers when you look closely—mostly just white, at other times white mixed with a few coloured stripes. It is much later I figured that the flowers were this small and inconspicuous. The three papery bits, the bracts, render the plant its colour, attraction and unmistakeable road signs for their small pollinators.
3 bracts for three flowers is quite an equality equation.
What is my Eureka Moment (EM)? That I am yet to find all three flowers in bloom together. I've always found one, mostly two, never three. My new found plant friends keep finding my EMs, and send me the pics.
Bougainvillae is “any of a genus of the four-o'clock Nyctaginaceae family of ornamental tropical American woody vines and shrubs with brilliant purple or red floral bracts” Merriam Webster Dictionary
More reading:
Housekeeping: all pictures are from my garden, except for the two screenshots from informative articles on the species. Google can help you find them.