Spanish Bouganvillea

                                                       


As Tripadvisor forum gets excited about demonstrations and broken windows in Marrakesh and american papers report peaceful demonstrations in Rabat and Casablanca I have to report that revolution has passed Taroudant by. Today is market day and everyone just wants to get on with business. So I blog about my new bouganvillea. 
It was Southern novels Tenessee Williams (OK, he's drama) and particularly James Lee Burke's Robicheaux novels that made me want bouganvillea. They made me want jacaranda too until I saw the size of the tree it grows to so I made do with plumbago. We planted several bouganvillea of different colours in the containers last year when we set up the terrace. They did not survive the summer heat and Moha replaced them but they cannot be said to be flourishing.
We have always planted small ones on the grounds of miserliness but we wondered if a more established plant with a bigger rootball may stand a better chance of surviving the summer. So when we went to Agadir we bought the largest in the nursery. Not only that we paid half as much again to have Spanish bouganvillea as opposed to your everyday bouganvillea.
The "flowers" of bouganvillea are not flowers at all but coloured bracts. As such they do not bloom and fade so bouganvillea is constantly in "bloom" all year round.They come in a variety of striking colours; magenta, purple, orange, scarlet and white. The spanish bouganvilla has bracts twice the size of ordinary bouganvillea and has two colours on one plant, presumably grafted. I wanted cerise to stand out against the turquoise terrace wall and was not too sure about the additional white, but I certainly wanted the larger bracts. We kept it a while before planting whilst we tried to find a space but took the plunge and planted it on friday. It now looks a rather unhappy plant and I can only hope it will recover  from it's root disturbance. We had brought quantities of water retaining gel from Wales which we used liberally so if it survives the transplant it may insallah survive the summer.