Even though some of the Pride of Barbados (a.k.a. Red Bird of Paradise) shrubs elsewhere in town have had flowers for a while, the first week in June seems to trigger my three shrubs in the courtyard to open their flowers. It was this week a year ago that my first Red Bird flower opened.
Some places, like the Caribbean islands, enjoy this shrub all year long, but since we have frosts, the shrubs go dormant after summer and fall. We are glad to have them when they have flowers like the one above.
From Wikipedia:
[Caesalpinia pulcherrima] is a shrub growing to 3 m tall. In climates with little to no frosts, this plant will grow larger and is semi-evergreen. Grown in climates with light to moderate freezing, plant will die back to the ground depending on cold, but will re-bound in mid to late spring. This species is more sensitive to cold than others. The leaves are bipinnate, 20–40 cm long, bearing 3-10 pairs of pinnae, each with 6-10 pairs of leaflets 15–25 mm long and 10–15 mm broad. The flowers are borne in racemes up to 20 cm long, each flower with five yellow, orange or red petals. The fruit is a pod 6–12 cm long.