![]() ![]() In Sydney, the sharp-eyed may have noticed the first blooms emerging from the bare branches of the trees along Oxford Street at the beginning of October. ![]() I was delighted to learn from horticulturist Stuart Macpherson that this is measurable: spring travels at about 3.2 kilometres an hour. Today, Australia’s eastern coastline shades lilac as the flowering of the jacaranda moves south, beginning in Queensland in late spring and ending in Victoria in early summer. In the same decade, Sydney’s society pages started reporting young ladies wearing gowns of jacaranda blue. 2īy the 1930s, the jacaranda was so common that some forgot it had ever been anything other than ours: a real estate listing for a Wahroonga bungalow describes English oaks and ‘native jacarandas’ growing side by side. One, which adorned the magnificent garden at Clarens, in Potts Point, was known by the Martin children as ‘the dream tree’. Guilfoyle’s Exotic Nursery at Double Bay went on to supply the city’s most fashionable gardens with jacarandas, and many of the eastern suburbs’ stately old giants are his legacy. The method involves cuttings and cold pits, bell jars and bottom heat – enough to daunt even the most passionate of green thumbs. Enthusiastic reports of his success neglect to mention how, but a paper read at the Horticultural Society in the same year gives some idea of the lengths he might have gone to. That changed in 1868, when landscape designer Michael Guilfoyle solved the riddle of propagation. The jacaranda flames on the air like a ghost, Like a purer sky some door in the sky has revealed.Įxcerpt from ‘The Jacaranda’ by Douglas Stewart, from The Dosser in Springtime (1946)Īll this meant that in its early years as an Australian import, the jacaranda was considered one of the rarest as well as the most beautiful of trees. (For this reason, they’re considered a pest in native bushland.) Colonial horticulturists were likely working with cuttings from established trees that hadn’t yet flowered, or old seeds that had deteriorated on the high seas en route from England or Brazil. Like other members of the Bignonia family, jacarandas are difficult to grow from cuttings, though they grow readily from freshly fallen seed. The mystery may have a simple explanation. Jacarandas, however, proved notoriously difficult to propagate – astonishingly so, as anyone who has tried to subdue rogue jacaranda seedlings sprouting up around a parent tree knows. Unlike in England, where the frost-tender jacaranda languished without a hothouse or conservatory to protect it, Sydney’s climate was a match for Rio’s. But though the odd tree was grown in private gardens from the 1850s, most were familiar only with the specimen in the botanic gardens. It’s difficult to imagine a time when jacarandas did not rain purple on Sydney streets. ![]()
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