A Mediterranean Style Garden With Arches Of Bougainvillea
Ever drooled over those photos from Greece and Morocco showing bright magenta bougainvillea growing up a white wall next to a blue door? Yes, me too, and the good news is that bougainvillea, and even more specifically the magenta bougainvillea grows really well in our mountain town here in Northern Israel. There are at least four colors of bougainvillea: magenta, deep coral, light orange and white, but apparently the magenta strain in the hardiest, especially important if you live in a location like mine that does get snow occassionally, and of course also important if you are planning to grow bougainvillea in a container, in which case it is less protected from dipping temperatures.
Okay, now back to those visions of climbing magenta bouganvillea. Six or so years ago I was called upon to design a garden in my neighborhood and I came up with a good solution for an awkward overhang— make it into a Spanish style arcade by building arches which give the overhang a reason for existing design wise. It turned out that my visions of stone arches did not fit the budget, so I decided to simply add columns and give the impression of arches by growing bougainvillea up the columns and across the openings. Then I realized that I could add iron arches to help the bougainvillea grow in an arch, and thus this arcade of bougainvillea was born. When I went to the nursery in the Fall of that year to buy bougainvillea plants, they promised me that that vines were all magenta blooms, and come spring it was quite a surprise to find this garden full or white, orange, coral and magenta, as though I had planned it. Truthfully the combination of colors is also lovely, and I’ll just have to do those arches of magenta elsewhere, hmmm that gives me an idea for my own garden…..Before you go and put up iron arches for your bougainvillea, there are a few really important things to consider, so lets take a closer look.
Bougainvillea plants may look like vines, but in actuality they are woody trees once they mature. This means that over time, the plant will develop a nice trunk or group of trunks, and the vines that grow many meters high will also become woody, and thus heavy! I have seen folks using a rope or two to hold up a vine, but the right way to do it from the start is with some serious reinforcement. Fortunately the metal worker whom I enlisted to make my bougainvillea arches knew all this, and together we designed something that would hold the weight ot the vines in the future and further my design concept of arches of bougainvillea. You can see the arches in these photos if you take a close look, but in person they are barely noticeable, and will be less so over the years. 
Here the metal arches are covered entirely.
Here you can see one end of the arch as the magenta bougainvillea that is supposed to be the hardiest has actually grown the least. Go figure!
If you decide to design some metal arches for a similar scenario, do take not that my arches are about 10cm under the roof and about 30 cm outside, which allows for the bougainvillea to grow over the arch, essentially on the wall above, If the arches were within the space formed by the columns and overhang the plant would be much less light and would have no where to go basically.
So that is my little story about bougainvillea and how to plan a Mediterranean garden on a budget, and yes, these beauties do need a bit of a haircut, which I’ll have to do. The gardener we’ve used is more like a butcher so I did not let him touch my precious vines, thank you very much!
And now dear friends, if your climate permits, go and get yourself some bougainvillea, and if not, you can always grow one as a houseplant!
