Bougainvillea

One of the most opulent plants you can grow in your Bahrain garden would be the bougainvillea, to wipe your eye with its vivaciously colourful bracts. This beauty is native to the tropical and subtropical regions of South America from Brazil west to Peru and south to southern Argentina.

Bougainvillea was named in honour of Louis Antoine Bougainville, the first Frenchman to cross the Pacific.

Whilst in Brazil, Commerson discovered a plant and named it after Bougainville. They introduced it to the South Pacific and their final destination, France, as a "stove plant", which means that it was nurtured indoors in the winter and kept near the warmth of a stove.

In Bahrain, only the shrubby and twining species and their hybrids and cultivars are evident. Bougainvilleas are most appealing when trained against a wall to make a fiery sheet of colour or left to cascade over a wall, but they are never so lovely as when they have worked their way up through a towering tree to cascade down dripping in colour.