Garden
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Bougainvillea
This is a plant that I used to see a lot as a child, when I lived in the Canary Islands. It doesn't need much water and it requires soft temperatures, so it makes sense that I saw it everywhere there. This past summer, when we were looking for a climbing plant to put in our patio, I saw a bougainvillea and I couldn't resist to get it as a memento of my childhood in the isles.
What I didn't know is that there were tree-varieties of bougainvillea. We bought a Bougainvillea Thai, so now what we have in our patio is a tree. It looked weird at first, but we thought it would eventually start climbing once it reached the wall. A few days after we planted it, we saw a Bougainvillea Vera and that's when we realized we got the wrong one. A happy accident though, because the tree is quite beautiful, to be honest. And we can always get a Vera next year.
Bougainvilleas are plants that can give flowers in purple, fuchsia, red, orange, yellow and white. I'm yet to see yellow ones, but I can assure you they're all gorgeous. When they start flowering it's an absolute blast of color that lasts for months. We got ours in August and it already had plenty of flowers. It's been 3 months and now it has even more! At this rate, it'll reach Christmas with them.
A curious thing about its flowers is that the colorful part that we see at first are the bracts, not the real flowers. Those are modified leaves that many plants grow to get the attention of insects. The real flowers are much smaller, and grow in groups of three at the center of the bracts.
Careful if you plan on getting one, because they have spines, even though they're fairly soft compared to what you would normally expect from a spine. Also, because it has so many flowers, when they start to wilt (which takes forever) they drop a lot of petals on the floor, so they'll be all over the place. I haven't experienced it yet, but I've seen it happening in public parks.