Summer Beauty! The beautiful summer flowers bring color and joy to the warm days. This bougainvillea spectabilis, also called great bougainvillea, is a flowering woody bush shrub. Very colorful, the flowers are small, white and inconspicuous as the brightly colored leaves, called bracts, surround the stems in red, mauve, purple red, orange and white. A stockier shape than bougainvillea glabra, known as the paper flower or lesser bougainvillea, which is a climbing vine with thorns.