With its vibrant natural, cultural and architectural heritage, Pune is an explorer's delight. In this issue, MetroScan invites you to enjoy the outburst of colour from the hardy bougainvilleas

"Fiery, thorny bougainvillea
Keeping Warbler's secret
- a nest
Surf's up,
someone shouted.
...Fooled you,
laughs frothing white bougainvillea.

The higher you go, the larger the bloom, and more intense the colour of the flowers," says one botanist. And here we are in Pune, about 550 metres above sea level, and it's the humble and hardy bougainvillea that truly bears out this statement. What a mind-boggling and eye-catching palette of colours our bougainvilleas offer. The intense pink, the vibrant fuschia, the deep purple, the fiery orange, the flaming crimson, the delicate rose-pink, lavender, golden yellow…and of course the frothy white bougainvillea - all bring their vibrant charm to city gardens, avenues and otherwise barren tracts.

This ornamental shrub is indeed a resilient citizen of Pune! Firstly, it simply needs no fuss and high-maintenance. It grows equally happily on roadsides, in rocky soil, and with hardly a gulp of water to sustain it. In fact, if you're cultivating a bougainvillea, it helps greatly to hold back the watering, to ensure profuse flowering. It also acts as a strong barrier or hedge around a compound, agreeably climbs up fences if you to train it to do so, and is open to being neatly pruned and shaped to form the focus of a garden. With its thorny branches, vigorous growth, low-water requirement, and stunning array of colours, the all-purpose bougain is truly a gardener's delight. Interestingly, what we call the flowers, are actually modified leaves or bracts - the actual flower is just the tiny white blossom inside a cluster of bracts.

An added bonus: because of its profuse foliage, blooms and thick branch network, all kinds of tiny, cheery birds make their nests, tucked away inside an overgrown bougainvillea - warblers, sparrows, munias...are safe and hidden from crows and other predators. We tend to take it for granted, as just a 'jungli' plant. But once this beautiful shrub has caught your eye, you'll simply love counting the many colours and shades of bougainvillea (at least 20) that you encounter as you drive around Pune. Nurseries around the city too have taken the modest bougainvillea to a 'higher plane', producing interesting double colour and bunched varieties and bonsai-like presentations too. As we move towards spring, Vasant Rutu, keep a lookout for the delightfully riotous, almost rowdy, outburst of colour from your neighbourhood bougain! And if you take a quiet peek inside, you'll also see some rather busy little birds, safe in the big-brother branches of the bougainvillea.

Anandi