Bougainvillea

• Watering and feeding it generously, assuming more care means more flowers. The opposite is usually true — bougainvillea blooms hardest under mild water stress, and rich, constant moisture with nitrogen feed pushes leafy growth instead of colour.
• Pruning hard in late summer or autumn. Flowers form on the current season's growth, so a late, heavy cut removes the wood that would have carried the next flowering flush.
• Planting it beside a path, gate or pool edge without accounting for its thorns. Most cultivars are genuinely sharp, and a plant placed for colour alone can become a hazard once it fills out.
• Giving it a flimsy trellis or wire support. Established bougainvillea is heavy and vigorous, and a weak structure will eventually sag or collapse under it.
• Treating a potted or newly planted specimen the same as an established one. Young plants still need regular watering to root in before the lean, dry-ish regime that mature plants thrive on.

• The genus is named after the French admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville, after the naturalist on his 1760s circumnavigation, Philibert Commerçon, first documented the plant flowering in Rio de Janeiro in 1767.
• What looks like the flower is actually a papery bract — a modified leaf — wrapped around the true flower, which is small, tubular and cream; the bracts simply last far longer and carry all the colour.
• It is not significantly toxic to people or pets; the thorns on most cultivars are the real hazard to plan around, not the plant's chemistry.
• Its salt tolerance is moderate rather than exceptional, so while it handles typical Dubai irrigation water well, a true coastal or high-salinity site may still favour a native like arak or samr instead.

Toxicity: Not significantly toxic; the thorns are the main hazard, not the plant's chemistry.