Nothing can come close to the HOT color bougainvilleas consistently provide in HOT weather! Yours are gorgeous!

Beautiful specimens, Omar.

Thank you, Ragna and buttoni.

Ragna, I think the name of the bouggy I gave you is “Raspberry Ice”. You were close, though. Yours is way bigger than mine. I keep mine in a 2 gal.I wouldn’t be able to overwinter them due to lack of space in my garage. I also found a “Blueberry Ice” at HEB @ $4 a couple months ago.

This is my favorite bouggy:

Omar

Omar, your HEB gets the neatest plants in. Mine doesn't, and it's a 'super store'. I guess it depends on who manages that department. 'Blueberry Ice' is gorgeous. As you know you gave me one when you gave me Rasberry Ice, but it didn't make it through the winter in the greenhouse. Saw a bigger plant at Lowes recently for $34.99.

I have a bougie with white and pink flowers too, but mostly in the spring. At this time of year all the flowers are pink. It also has slightly variegated leaves. Does yours?

I love bougainvilleas, but only have two. I've tried them in the ground several times but they die. A guy up the street grows one in ground and it gets pretty big in the summer. He covers it in the winter.

I've had one for years in the same pot and soil. I thought it died this year but now I'm seeing small bits of green. I need to repot it. What kind of pots does yours do best in?

Hi Ruth! I grow them in two or three gallon pots with Miracle Gro potting soil and lots of fertilizer through the summer. In the ground they want to grow large before they flower. Beautiful when they do, but often there is a waiting period. In pots they start flowering almost as soon as I take them out of the overwintering house.

Ragna, yes, I have found interesting and cheap plants at my HEB. Sadly, I think that person is gone because I have only seen regular plants lately.

I thought about you when I found my “Blueberry Ice” but you were getting rid of some of your bouggies at that time and I thought you wouldn’t want another plant to overwinter.

Also, Ragna, your white bouggie is more interesting than mine. Mine doesn’t show any variegation.

Ruth, what Ragna said about pots. On top of that, I think Ragna places the 2-3 gal pots inside bigger ones with good soil so the roots can get out of the small pot and feed from the good soil, and when the cold weather comes, you can just jank it out. Is that correct, Ragna? I kept mine in the small pots so the plants stay small.

Omar

Thanks for THINKING about me when you got YOUR 'blueberry ice' ... LOL ... but I must admit that you were right, I have given away some of my bougies so we'd have less to carry in the greenhouse these days. And besides, although beautiful, it seems the 'Blueberry ice' is not as robust as the 'Raspberry ice, but I may be wrong. Keep us posted on how it grows for you.

Putting smaller pots inside of bigger pots to save weight when moving them inside sounds like a good idea, but it must have been someone else that does that. Not me.

I thought they were going dormant for the Fall, but my hanging basket 'Red Flame' bougies are putting on a second flush of blooms this week. Took these shots a little while ago. Guess they liked the recent fert. feed and lots more water Omar recommended.

Butonni, those look wonderful! Here they keep on flowering into fall. Keep on with the fertilizer, water and full hot sun and they will bloom their heads off. Sometimes when a freeze is predicted I have to take them into the overwintering house in full bloom.

Mine are in full flower as well, except for the variegated Strawberry Ice in the center although it's starting. Will give them all a little fertilizer today consisting of couple tablespoons of the powder for making liquid fertilizer and water it in. All are in two to three gallon pots.

I used to have bougies on the two plant stands, but the trees grew large and they didn't get enough sun.

Yours are lovely, Roselee, as always.

Oh, I just love your blue painted dead branch Roselee. Reminds me of many years ago. My Dad used to take dead branches he collected on his property and paint them white. Then Mom would decorate with white xmas lights, some satin pear ornaments and a single partridge ornament. She put it in her 8' diningroom window. Gorgeous.

So I soon thereafter drug my husband all over Texas to get "the perfect branch" one year (He was so embarrassed to have that on the top of the car all the way from Texarkana to Galveston LOL. He's never let me forget that one. I then anchored it in a 3# coffee can of plaster of Paris, painted the branch white, and hand sewed some homemade red and green satin 5" poinsettia ornaments. With all white lights, the tree was very pretty. Placed it in a beautiful wicker container. I used to have a photo of it that didn't get backed up and I lost it in a computer crash. :( I perched it high up on a buffet in my front room that allowed it to be viewed perfectly framed by the window from the street/sidewalk through my living room window. People would stop on the sidewalk to admire it. Alas, the satin ornaments faded over the years and were no longer pretty enough to put on display. They were just too hard to make new ones plus I've not had the perfect window to display one in the 3 houses I've lived in since. My husband is glad I'm not into "dead trees" anymore. :) But in a garden.......well yours is lovely.

Oh, those painted branches that your Mom and you decorated sound gorgeous! I was thinking my branches looked kind of Christmas-like when I was painting them. But I got the idea of their use in the landscape from several blog posts including Pam Penick's blog "Digging".

Did you notice the turquoise branch in the turquoise pot on the right? Omar and I were talking about the value of echoing/repeating plantings across the landscape so I decided another painted branch would be in order; especially since I had another piece of the dead Indian Hawthorn that we cut down in my sister's yard.

The wood from the Indian Hawthorn is very hard! Bob like to never got it sawed off so am expecting it will last a long time.

How did I miss that one? Maybe the statue in between distracted my eye focus. LOL The turquoise branch is lovely, too! I like balance and symmetry..............and the statue. :)

Well, David is a tad distracting -- being great art and all that ... ;-) I've gotten some teasing about him from this forum through the years, such as on this post.

Oh, I haven't laughed so hard in ages, Roselee. Thank for sharing that blast from the past. Made my day. LOL

LOL Glad our old threads still have some laughs in them!

Here's a closeup of the turquoise 'art branch'.

In this pot I left a baby Agave 'blue glow', silver pony foot, and a succulent ...

To stay on the subject of this thread here is the bougie I plopped down in a 3 ft. wide planter with purple heart. It was an unplanned move undertaken when the 'striped beauty' canna in the center couldn't take the intense sun, but think the combo producing the purple heart skirt turned out pretty well ...