I confess .... I covet my neighbor's bougainvillea

Yes, it's true ... I covet my neighbor's bougainvillea - not necessarily the next-door neighbor, but neighbor in a more general sense.

You can't walk in our neighborhood without  noticing them... bougainvilleas spilling over gates and through fences, falling all over themselves, like some sort of floral lava flow.

There is no better way to dress up a chicken wire fence than to let bougainvillea take it over.

Even outside the bleakest looking walls, wild and unkempt, they spill across the sidewalk in a blaze of colors.

They even adorn the piles of trash. 

 And not just the standard purple ... blazing fuschia, almost red, salmon, burnt orange, deep gold, sunny yellow, light pink, white....

 This is our little garden, where our little bougainvilleas bravely reach up. When you get them home from the nursery and plant them, they promptly wilt, the flowers fall off, and they look dead for several weeks ... but then they start coming back. It doesn't look like much yet, but I hope in a year's time to have the same gorgeous billows of bougainvillea piling over our walls.

But in the meantime, I covet my neighbor's bougainvillea.