Thursday, July 26, 2007

Bi-coloured bougainvillea

We had a lot of success with bougainvilleas at our other house. But the cuttings I made before we moved all died. So on one of our plant-buying expeditions we chose a small bougainvillea. It had a few deep pink bracts, like the huge one at the front of our old house.

Bougainvilleas don't need a lot of care - a bit of water, plenty of sunshine, and lots of neglect. Just my kind of plant, in fact. And sure enough, although the pink bracts fell off fairly quickly, the new one sprouted new leaves and has kept growing in several directions.

A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to see that it had produced white bracts:


I thought I must have been mistaken about the deep pink, but wasn't worried. They were rather attractive, anyway, and I knew we would probably buy another bougainvillea at some point.

Then, about a week ago, having neglected the plant other than the occasional water, I was amazed to see that there were indeed deep pink bracts as well as the white ones. Indeed, the white ones seemed to have turned into a very pale pink:


But there are definitely two clear colours on one plant. Very odd. I've previously assumed that when two colours of bougainvillea were showing entwined on a large plant that it was two individual plants growing together - but perhaps not.

Attractive, anyway.

1 comment:

Gill said...

They're really pretty :-)