I've been gardening in CA a long time, more than 50 years. Over those years I've read repeatedly how to plant a bougainvillea, how delicate the roots are and how you have to be extremely careful to not disturb them when they are planted. I even remember an old edition of the Sunset gardening book, published when plants still came in metal cans, that suggested you cut out the bottom of the can and then plant the whole thing so the roots remained completely undisturbed and allowed the rest of the can to just rust away.

In mid October I planted a new California Gold bougainvillea. I had planted another CG a few years ago and it had thrived in my garden. An Orange King bougie planted at the same time just couldn't succeed in my garden. The slightest bit of cold stopped it in its tracks, it took forever to take off in the spring, and even in the hottest weather the color wasn't really orange, more of a pinkish orange. So I took it out and got another CG.

I wanted a 1 gallon but after a lot of looking and even requesting a special order from Armstrong that never arrived I found a 5 gallon. I carefully tried to remove it from the can, it had lots of very healthy roots. But as I carefully lifted it up the whole root ball just disintegrated and I was left with not much more than a few inches of thick roots just at the dirt line. Everything else had broken off.

I was certain the plant was a goner along with my $30 but I cut it back hard and planted it anyway with almost no hope that it would survive. A few days ago I was looking at it and saw this:

This was just about the worst case disturbance of roots there could be, yet it survived and its growing.

And, I took this with my phone and saw it was rotated when I first inserted it. I opened it in paint and rotated it, saved it and reinserted, still rotated. I opened it again in Paint, rotated it and cropped it, saved it and reinserted, it is still rotated.