![]() ![]() “On my account, I noticed in general that if there are any flowers, the likes go up by hundreds and hundreds.”ĭespite the social media clout, jacarandas are not universally beloved, and any post marveling at their beauty will probably get comments on both their nonnative status and the irksome petals they drop at the end of their spring flourish.īut Malarich finds the fallen blooms part of the charm. “People who do not normally take pictures of trees suddenly have these gorgeous photos of jacarandas,” she said. Carrie said that around this time every year, her Instagram feed is awash with jacarandas. ![]() Rachel Malarich, the Los Angeles city forest officer, said the 19,182 publicly managed jacarandas are mostly in “fair to very good” condition despite the oldest ones potentially nearing the end of their normal life spans.Īnd it shows. And yet here, in front of a quite ordinary house, you have this glorious blue, purple-blue interloper from the jungle.” “We tend to think of suburban places in the early ’50s as being uniform, and frankly kind of uninteresting places. “The developers of tract-house suburbs in Southern California planted very consciously an exotic tree,” Waldie told me. Waldie, an author whose memoir, “Holy Land,” chronicles growing up in Lakewood, one of the first planned communities in the United States, said the jacarandas were an advertisement for the place. Their proliferation coincided with the population boom of Los Angeles - which grew to 2.5 million people in 1960 from 576,000 in 1920 - and the blue of their flowers became a shade of the Southern California idea in the American imagination.ĭ.J. Maybe you’ve even seen a residential street transformed into a technicolor tree tunnel. Sidewalks are littered with the sticky blossoms. “There’s no better remedy for curing tree blindness than a jacaranda in bloom.”Ĭhances are, if you live in Southern California, your neighborhood park has exploded in purple over the past few weeks. “The blooms are so extreme and incredible that it’s like the first time someone actually notices that there’s a tree,” she said of the flowering, typically between April and June. She is grateful to the jacarandas for their work. I wanted to ask you what it was?’ I said, ‘Did it have purple flowers? It’s a jacaranda.’ And I’m like, Oh, my god, how many years have you lived in Los Angeles?”Ĭarrie, who lives in Culver City, started the account to counteract “tree blindness,” the particularly urban syndrome of seeing but not noticing a city’s streetside forestry. Instagram account, gets the same question: “Someone said, ‘I saw a tree the other day, Stephanie. Looking down upon Santa Barbara this time of year from the hills, the purple jacarandas brighten the lush Santa Barbara greenery.īut before you grow this well loved tree remember that some say the nicest jacaranda is on your neighbor's property, where you can enjoy it without having to keep a rake handy.Every year, about this time, Stephanie Carrie, who started the Trees of L.A. Carrillo Street is lined with them, most especially between Garden and Laguna streets, and they fill the Five Points Plaza parking lot on Upper State. Jacarandas in Santa Barbara are abundant. The flowers are followed by distinctive flat, two-inch seed pods reminiscent of castanets. When the flowers fall, they retain their purple color, producing a vivid purple carpet. In fact, Pretoria, a city in South Africa, has such an abundance that it has been affectionately named The Jacaranda City. The Jacaranda does exceptionally well in our dry coastal climate and can be found growing prolifically in Australia, the Mediterranean and Africa. Native to Central and South America, the Jacaranda mimosifolia - the proper name for Santa Barbara's Jacaranda - was popularized here in California by the horticulturist Kate Sessions, who imported seeds from around the world to populate the then barren Balboa Park in San Diego. Purple jacaranda trees are unusual in that they drop their leaves in the spring before they flower and then re-leaf during the summer, making their lively lilac bloom uninterrupted by green leaves. The purple bell-shaped blossoms transform the city with eruptions of vibrant lavender color, reminding us that June is just around the corner. As the I Madonnari festival nears and the city fills to the brim this Memorial Day weekend, Santa Barbara's glorious jacarandas are bursting into bloom.
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