Maybe a wisteria?

Today was designated Kettle Drum day.  Larry and packed up the gardening tools and headed down to the Kettle Drum house to mow the lawn, pull the weeds, spray the areas we want nothing to grow in and generally do a complete check up on the place.

We had to replace the entire front yard of the Kettle Drum house because the drought had so weakened it that when the contractor we'd hired to start up the outdoor system delayed two weeks, supposedly to give it a chance in case of a late freeze, but instead it finally threw up a red flag and died.  Our tenants spent half the summer with a dead tree and lawn while we waited our turn in the long line of people with similar issues to have their lawns replaced.

Larry, being overly cautious about what I can and cannot do, decided I would be gopher and sent me out to get gas for the lawn mower and buy some new plants to replace the less hardy, and therefore, dead shrubs and flowers in the front yard.  I was somewhat successful and bought a couple of low growing sage... a standard up here in the alpine regions. Then I was looking for a replacement for the juniper that had been planted in a pot, designed to grow and cover the posts to the front porch and I came across bougainvillea.  Really!  Bougainvillea.  This strikes me as like the saying salmon fishing in Yemen.

Bougainvillea are one of my most favorite plants, they love to be ignored, watered infrequently and love to be left to sprawl all over TROPICAL hillsides splattering bright fuchsia color about  In California they train them to grow up palm trees to belay the telephone with a plant on top feel but we live at 7200 feet.  It snows here as early as late September and as late as mid June.  Who in their right mind plants a bougainvillea in Monument... or even Colorado Spring?  It's premeditated murder!  Apparently the wealthier contingent in our area do.  They plant them as annuals. ANNUALS! They spend hundreds of dollars to buy bougies big enough to make a summertime splash then callously let them die come winter.  Oh maybe some of them have a green house to move them to, but for the most part, they just plain let them die.

I left the nursery with a shrub much more suited to our environment, sighing with envy at the thought of a bougainvillea climbing the front porch of the Kettle Drum house but unable to bring myself to cold bloodedly leave the poor thing to freeze to death in our first snowfall.  Maybe a wisteria?