by Elizabeth ShaheenOur April garden is alight with colour from the annuals, perennials, climbers, shrubs and trees.

The bougainvillea hedge of Bougainvillea spectabilis “Mary Palmer” flounces its mixed bracts of carmine-red and milk-white on to the driveway which it lines.

It is absolutely stunning and when friends visit they convey that its duvet of colour is so inviting that they wish that they could recline on it!

After a four-year wait Petrea volubilis has presented its magnificent, ostentatious racemes of exquisite star-like flowers of long, lilac-blue sepals and petite, violet corolla. This loveliness is a treasure from the Soffitel hotel in Hua Hin, Thailand. I, with permission from the management, took the cutting and kept it for two weeks in a plastic zip-up bag which I had blown air into.

Once home, I potted it up and now its exquisiteness adorns our garden.

Saritaea magnifica, is just that – simply magnificent. It fountains the most stylish yellow-throated, mauve, bell-shaped flowers.

We have one climbing a date palm and another climbs an enormous post by our front, roadside gate, and travels along the security wires, just having its way. It is a torrent of mauve for passers-by to admire.

So too has Beaumontia grandiflora tested my patience. Again, from a cutting taken in Thailand, this beauty is in bloom after a five-year wait. But, oh, how wonderfully it has repaid my patience.

This majesty is native to India and the Himalayas and possesses a most appropriate vernacular, that of “Herald’s-trumpet”.

It is a woody climber or small tree having opposite ovate leaves to 20cm long in a perfect green. It will rise up to six metres or more but it needs strong support for its sturdy, twining stems.

It is prized for its perfumed, five-twisted-lobed, snow-white trumpet-shaped flowers that simply bounce off this glory opening ever more from loose clusters on the terminals of leafy lateral branches.

Ours has its feet in the shade and its head in the sun, which most climbing plants prefer. There are nine species to be found within the genus and they are all fragrant? breathtaking.

Two colloquial names are awarded to Caesalpinia gilliesii: they are “dwarf Poinciana” and “bird of paradise bush”.

Fern-like leaves dress this comeliness which provides us with charming spikes of flowers of a yolk-yellow hue with long, unreservedly immodest crimson lashes for stamens. It is a shrub or a small tree.

The weeping bottlebrush Callistemon viminalis drips rich-red, brush-like flower spikes. Its natural habitat is the coastal lowland streams of Queensland and New South Wales and it attains a height of nine metres with a crowded arched crown and pendulous branches.

The lemon bottlebrush Callistemon citrinus begat its name due to the lemon scent that is secreted from the leaves when crushed.

It is also called the scarlet bottlebrush and one of ours acts as a backdrop to the waterfall. It is simply lovely and is one of the first bottlebrushes to be used for garden glory.

In its natural state it is found scattered across the coastal areas of southeastern Australia.

A most charming display is given by Incarvillea delavayi. This fleshy-rooted, clump-forming perennial is a jewel I planted in February from England.

It is flowering in one of the beds in the lawn and its bedfellows are from around the world, an indication of the sheer ingenuity of plants as to their ability to adapt to conditions of distant lands. Its natural domicile is the Himalayas and western and southwestern China. I bought it in England as a tuber and it is flowering in our Bahrain garden! It displays beautiful fern-like foliage and bugle-shaped, rosy-purple flowers and attains a height of a mere 60cm with a spread of 30cm.

The Easter lily (Lilium longiflorum) scents the borders with its immodest trumpet-shaped flowers in swansdown-white. I leave the tubers undisturbed, allowing the stems to die down, thus replenishing the corm.

When cutting for the vase, it is essential to leave at least one-third of the stem to ensure that there is enough food to feed the corm as the stem dies back.

Purple-blue to rich purple flowers adorn the shrubby perennial Browallia speciosa.

I exploit this attractiveness as a ground cover and it helps to keep the roots of some of its consorts cool in summer. It hails from Tropical South America and the West Indies.

Barleria lupulina has pretty, peachy-yellow flowers which appear from terminal hop-like spikes of green bracts that are washed over in burgundy. In fact, it earned it common name “hop-headed barleria” owing to its hop-like bracts.

In flower, but as yet not in leaf, is Gliricidia sepium, known as the “Mexican lilac” and “madre de cacao”, meaning in Spanish “mother of cacao”, for it is exploited as a shade tree for coffee and cacao plantations.

Its branches are tightly clad in extravagant racemes of pea-shaped flowers in shades of pinkish-lilac and white.

The tree is simply abuzz with busy bees.

In winter it casts its leaves and these reappear as the flowers fade, so one gains the beauty of the flowers alone, which are edible.

In Central America, which is its natural home, the indigenous peoples grind the seeds to produce rat poison. Its root nodules possess inherent bacteria, which allow them to absorb the free nitrogen in the air. How clever is that!

It is always advisable to find out where a plant you plan to grow in your garden hails from, to give you an idea of it requirements.

But as I have already noted, plants have an incredible ability to adapt to new-found lands.

Many of the plants mentioned here, feature in my book “Tropical Trees and Shrubs of Bahrain”.

The Bahrain Garden Club has invited me to give a lecture on April 22. I shall be giving a slideshow of plants that revel in Bahrain’s summer heat. Non-members are also welcome you will simply be asked to pay a small fee of BD1.

The event begins at 4pm, at the clubhouse in Juffair. So please join us, even if you are an armchair gardener.