Bougainvillea blossoms make fine lei

My bougainvillea gave me a gift this year.

I had to make a lot of lei this holiday season — birthdays, an almost-50th wedding anniversary (Masami and Pearl) and hostess gifts. I made flower arrangements for some, but the gift of a hand-sewn lei is true aloha.

Yes, a florist would have been faster and easier, but where’s the fun in that? My lei come from flowers grown in Hawaii, chemical free.

The weather had things blooming out of time, so I found some plumeria and pua kenikeni for my lei, but I didn’t have quite enough, so I looked around my garden and my neighborhood and went, “Aha, bougainvillea!”

Native to Brazil, this plant is a winter bloomer. The shorter days stimulate it to bloom, just like poinsettias.

The bright “flowers” that catch our eyes are actually colorful bracts, or modified leaves. The true flowers are white and peek out from the bracts. Collect the bracts in a bag, clean and pluck them, and start stringing.

It takes me back to small-kid time where we would make lots of lei, mostly from plumeria and bougainvillea, abundant in our neighborhood and easy to string. The other great thing about bougies is that they dry well and retain some of their color.

For years we had the purple bougies, quite thorny and apt to go wild. After my dad battled a wild thorny purple one for more than 10 years, getting poked and mad, and inadvertently killing our prized rainbow plumeria in the process, our family made a new rule: No bougies planted in the ground.

As a landscape designer, I always caution clients to think hard before planting one in the ground. They are way more manageable in a pot. They are best in the ground if you have a wild hillside and need color. They are great in spots like freeway embankments as they are a xeric, or less thirsty, plant.

We got many new varieties thanks to the vision of Paul Weissich of the Honolulu Botanical Gardens and the plant connections of the late Donald Angus, in the 1960s and early ’70s. Together they collected and legally imported new and wonderful varieties like Miss Manila (a peach-and-coral-colored hybrid from the Philippines) and the double-flowered Carmencita. Plant sales were wild events in those days, with people lining up to get these new, exciting varieties. Today they are part of the landscape, and many people don’t know how much effort it took to bring them here.

My nau, or native gardenia, has been blooming like crazy, stimulated by the bountiful rain and the supermoons. The buds of nau make for an amazing lei. If I really want to slow down the blooming-and-unfurling phase, I pick the buds and put them in tiny vases or in the fridge immersed in water.

The native gardenia was brought back from the brink of extinction by conservationists and horticulturists. It’s important to protect and nurture them in the wild by controlling weeds, feral animals and wildfire.

Heidi Bornhorst is a sustainable landscape consultant specializing in native, xeric and edible gardens. Reach her at heidibornhorst@gmail.com.