Fake 173

A new-to-me variety of flowering plastic ivy, captured outside the Turkish restaurant in Ewell Village which occupies the premises of what used to be quite a good Chinese restaurant. We have yet to try the Turkish restaurant, and now may well not do so, having got Cappadocia at our end of Epsom High Street.

English ivy does flower, but not in this way. See, for example, reference 2.

Google Image Search was not fooled at all and tells me that it is East Bougainvillea Pink, to be had from Robert Dyas, eBay, Amazon and all good garden stores. And while the individual flowers are roughly right, the plant as a whole looks rather different.

[Its low water requirements make the bougainvillea an ideal plant for the decoration of dry places, such as the Greek island of Santorini depicted]

According to reference 3 their home range is South America, but they seem to have spread to lots of warm parts of the world and a lot of seeds seem to be described as Sri Lankan, while the caption to the snap above talks of it not needing much water. The flashy bits of the flowers are not petals, rather bracts, that is to say specialised leaves, with the flowers being small and insignificant, nesting inside the cups made by the bracts.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/fake-172.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/09/wasps.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bougainvillea.

Group search key: fakesk.