With the cunning of flowers

The humble bougainvillea flower is generally not thought to be particularly beautiful. People love roses, orchids, tulips: flowers that are mysterious and exotic and fragrant.

But the thick clusters of pinkish-orange bougainvillea flowers that fill my living-room window these days give me immense pleasure. Strictly speaking, what we think of as the "flowers" of the bougainvillea are not even flowers, but something called bracts. It is these papery-thin bracts that are brilliantly coloured, and within them can be found the tiny white delicate flower of the bougainvillea.

In his fascinating book, The Botany of Desire, Michel Pollan suggests that flowers – which existed on earth long before humans did - use their beauty as a cunning survival strategy to make us desire them, and so help to propagate the plant.

Without flowers [writes Pollan], the reptiles, which had gotten along fine in a leafy, fruitless world, would probably still rule. Without flowers we would not be. . . So the flowers begot us, their greatest admirers. In time human desire entered into the natural history of the flower, and the flower did what it has always done: made itself still more beautiful in the eyes of this animal, folding into its very being even the most improbable of our notions and tropes. Now came roses that resembled aroused nymphs, tulip petals in the shape of daggers, peonies bearing the scent of a woman. We in turn did our part, multiplying the flowers beyond reason, moving their seeds around the planet, writing books to spread their fame and ensure their happiness. For the flower it was the same old story, another grand co-evolutionary bargain with a willing, slightly credulous animal –

I have a strange fascination for the bougainvillea. And nowhere else have I seen it grow in such profusion as in Goa, or in such a profusion of fantastic colours: from crimson and orange, to mauve and even purple. In most cases it is just allowed to grow wild, often entwining itself into an an existing gigantic tree, offering its own flowers to make the tree more beautiful. Some bougainvillea plants themselves grow tall as trees. Bougainvillea growing near the beach has almost no leaves, but only cluster of flowers. Flowers and yet more flowers. Perhaps to teach us something about the deeper mysteries of beauty.