Bougainvillea

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers, roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, red hot poker, vinca, rock rose, sweet pea, sea pink, hollyhocks, pinks, bouncing Bess, snapdragon, golden spur columbine, Saint John’s wort, some grasses.

What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, buddleia, loco, snow-in-summer.

What’s red: Cholla, coral bells, beardtongues, soapworts, pink evening primrose, purple aster.

What’s blooming inside: Christmas cactus, aptenia, rochea, bougainvillea, zonal geraniums.

Animal sightings: A popcorn eating mouse, come in from the cold, has been leaving droppings on the kitchen floor.

Weather: Sunny afternoons with temperatures around 40 have alternated with very cold mornings to thaw and refreeze the drive each day.

Weekly update: Houseplants on my enclosed porch have a very simple contract: in return for regular water, some occasional fertilizer and heat in the winter, they’re expected to bloom in January. The flowers don’t have to be fragrant, don’t have to be exotic, but they do have to be bright.

When the remaining snow hides from the sun in northern shadows and water collects on frozen ground or seeps through a thin veneer of soft mud, I want to look up from my desk and see color. Geranium red, bougainvillea pink. Color.

In fact, the plants don’t even have to produce flowers if they promise color. Bougainvilleas are members of the four o’clock family with tiny white, five-petaled flowers perched on wasp-waisted tubes that are attached to large, brilliant bracts that resemble reflectors placed behind candles.

In the Canary Islands, the fragrance of the flowers brings hawk moths when they first open in the evening. In the Lucknow botanical gardens, butterflies come for the nectar and transfer pollen between adjoining varieties. In South America, hummingbirds flit from plant to plant. But in Florida, where single varieties abound, the woody vines are sterile and only the color could have attracted Jim Hendry in 1927 when he began hybridizing them.

His grandmother, Julia Frierson, brought the first magenta-colored Bougainvilles glabra ‘Sanderiana’ vine from Cuba in 1875. In 1919, his Everglades Nursery gave 200 ‘Crimson Lake’ cultivars to Fort Myers, and made a second gift in 1922 when Carl Fischer was promoting a highway from the midwest to his real estate investments in Miami. Local businessmen, no doubt, were lobbying to have the road come through the town where Henry Ford wintered with Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone.

Of course, if one were wealthy enough, one could have seen them in Rio de Janiero where Philibert Commerçon first collected them in 1768 or noticed them on the way to the casinos in Havana or found them climbing the walls of an Italian villa where their thorns warned off intruders. Most Americans in the 1920's, however, probably first saw bougainvilleas growing in Fort Myers, for the western route of the Dixie Highway did indeed pass Hendry’s showroom on its way from Chicago and Chattanooga to Miami.

The eastern route, however, is the one people would have used when I was growing up, the one that connected Detroit and Knoxville with the Soo and east coast of Florida. My first sense of winter color comes from walking by the windows of the exclusive women’s clothing store in the nearest city that featured beachwear in January. Inside, clerks reminded customers it had a convenient branch in Palm Beach.

Now I’ve personally never been to Florida, and probably saw my first bougainvillea in Phoenix in the 1980's where they’re so common the peaches and pinks of the short-day flowers were muddy and mundane. Still, I know I owe my plant to Hendry because he released ‘Barbara Karst’ around 1940 and every plant in existence must trace its heritage back to a cutting from his creation.

However, the reason I bought it has nothing to do with him or Florida, and everything to do with Fischer, who made his money manufacturing headlights. For him, cars weren’t a safe trust fund. They were about racing at the Indianapolis track he built. They were about escaping midwestern winters down a smooth, broad way south. They were about providing an alternative to Ford’s monotonous black. They were about color, brilliant bougainvillea pink.

Color.

Notes:
Hendry, Helen Johnson. "History of Bougainvillea," A. W. Kelley’s Gardens website, 2007.

Zadoo, S. N., R. P. Roy, and T. N. Khoshoo. "Cytogenetics of Cultivated Bougainvilleas II: Pollination Mechanism and Breeding System," Proceedings of the Indian National Science Academy 41: 498-5-3:1975.

Photograph: Two Barbara Karst bougainvillea buds and a flower, each attached to the central vein of a separate bract just below the base of the tube, 3 January 2009.