Purple reign: what jacaranda season really means to us

Neil Breen on the annual purple bloom

Is it just me, or are the jacarandas late in blooming this year?

Since moving into the Eastern Suburbs from Brisbane in 2003, it’s always been slightly disconcerting to me that they are later to come out here than they are in the warmer climes of the north.

In Brisbane, the jacarandas burst in September, and for me are forever synonymous with exam season. When I was at school and university, if you didn’t have your academic act together by the time the jacarandas turned purple, you had to get your skates on.

After a trip north in the second week of this October, the first thing I noticed were the jacarandas. As sure as night turns into day, they were bursting like huge bunches of flowers. 

On my return to Sydney, I checked the jacarandas around Paddington, including the adolescent one outside our place. There appeared to be a faint purple. The trees were bare and looked like they wanted to bloom, but it just wasn’t quite happening.

Admittedly, the spring weather has been weird: unseasonably cold and very wet. Maybe these trees just aren’t ready.

But they will be, and when that purple bursts across our suburbs it’s like a billboard for the summer that’s on the way, sending us outdoors and into the good times.

Apart from the colour, that’s what I love about them. Like the rest of us, they battle their way through winter and its challenges.

And when it’s over, out they come, and we follow: to the parks, the beaches and the bars.

The blooming of the jacarandas is a particularly joyous occasion when you have kids and live in a poky terrace house. 

Finally the months spent crouching beside the heater, days of too much television and of soccer balls bouncing off the walls, are over for a while. It seems as though we live on top of each other from May through to September and, this year, well into October. But as the late spring finally morphs into summer, the jacarandas will tell us when it’s time to get outside.

Life is easier in the summer. We can express ourselves more readily. We can live and breathe and enjoy.

Just like those jacarandas … Long may they reign purple, covering our cars and footpaths with their particularly beautiful spring snow.