There are three things that make me fall in love with bougainvilleas: the name (with complex spelling), the colors and their tendency to sprawl. I have lived with a buga for 33 years. We had it in a pot for a decade, and when we transplanted it, it grew to colossal dimensions. The name comes from the French explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville, author of Voyage autour du monde (1771), and each language adapts the spelling as best it can. Perhaps that is why few bards dare to introduce it in their poems and it has been able to live apart from the Floral Games.
The first bougainvilleas arrived in Europe aboard La Boudese and L’Étoile, the two ships of the scientific expedition captained by the Count of Bougainville that circumnavigated the planet from 1766 to 1769. As expected, the discovery of the plant in the area we know today as Rio de Janeiro was not made by the captain, but by the naturalist on board, a botanist named Philibert Commerçon. But Commerçon was in delicate health and, in fact, died during the journey. The possibility of adding a broken ce to the name was destroyed. It’s a shame, because calling it commercial would have been lovely.
Beautiful but also inappropriate. Since Commerçon already had a lame leg, he was unable to disembark in Rio and it was his assistant who collected the first specimens of bougainvillea. The botanist traveled with an assistant who looked after him day and night, in his cabin. As Bougainville recorded in his diary, in April 1768 the natives of Tahiti surrounded the assistant and the work that the French had to get him up to L’Étoile safe and sound. Or sane and thrifty, because it turned out that the assistant in question was Commerçon’s lover, a woman named Jeanne Baret, who had been pretending to be a boy for nearly two years.
