Bougainvillea Blossoms

These are the flowers that sold the house.

I also have a love-hate relationship with them.

Bougainvilleas.  Beautiful to look at, painful to maintain.

They have these spikes, that can be up to two inches long.  The spikes will scratch you even if you are nowhere near them.   I swear this plant will reach out and grab you and leave scratch lines on your skin.

Just watch out.

But they are also on a trellis behind the house.  It is the entire length of the Florida room as well as its height.  Say 10 by 20 feet.  If you look in the front window through the living room, you see these red, fushcia, and pink blossoms glowing at you from a distance hovering over part of the swimming pool.

Then you get closer and they bite your arms.

They don't bite Rack though.  My dog is able to walk under the plant and come out unscathed.  There's a path of cement squares under the arbor that he uses as a garden path.  They're where they are so the rain doesn't scour a gulley under my eaves.  He's small enough that he's enveloped in a world of cool shade, hot pink flowers, and a general feeling of warmth.  Or so I imagine as I see he's taken to wandering under the thing when he's outside in the sun.

In this climate they're also fairly fast growing so I'm usually armed with a pair of clippers when I am out back.   I have to assume I could make a red or pink dye out of the flowers that float on the breeze.  One day after stepping on a spine from that evil plant, I put my shoes back on.  I rarely go barefoot out back as a result.  Later that night I got ready for bed and noticed that my white socks now had a pink blob on the bottom of them.  On my foot where the blob was was a flattened remnant of one of those pink flowers.   The pink did eventually wash out of my sock but it wasn't after a couple washings.

Oh well, nobody ever looks at the bottom of my socks but me.

I thought you might want a little beauty, as well as a story.   So have a bougainvillea flower but watch for the thorns.