From Lofty, click for full size. So beautiful! And I love the fence in the last pic.
In a little enclave just near the City, it’s the time that the Jacaranda trees are flowering, the public gardens are well tended and the 100 year old houses look pretty. Last night’s storm knocked half the blue flowers off the trees and carpeted the streets with them.
© Lofty, all rights reserved.
Jacaranda? Jacaranda! Time for another song by María Elena Walsh.
To the east and to the west
It rains and it will rain
(A flower and another blue flower
From the Jacaranda.)
The old woman is in the cave*
But she will soon come out,
(To see how beautiful it snows
From the Jacaranda.)
The squirrels laugh,
“Ha hara ha ha”
(Because the wind is tickling
The Jacaranda.)
The sky is drawn in the sidewalk
with foam and silk paper from the Jacaranda
The wind, as a wizard, passed by;
It erased the Jacaranda’s drawing with its tail.
If you pass by the school
The children, perhaps,
(Will wear a cockade
Of Jacaranda.)
To the east and to the west
It rains and it will rain
(A flower and another blue flower
From the Jacaranda.)
* Reference to a Spanish children’s rhyme. “Let it rain, let it rain; the old woman’s in the cave.”
The violet blue of the flowers is sensual.
It’s a shade that I find surreal and unusual, even artificial -- you’re not supposed to find large swathes of that colour in nature! And yet there is the jacaranda.
I want to see them bloom with my own eyes one day (though I do understand that they are a bit of a curse on those allergic to tree pollen).
(Incidentally, that’s a lovely rose garden, too!)
So, if some of us like colours that are “unnatural”, what kind of ghosts are haunting us?
Ice Swimmer
I don’t think I really want to know. Too much about ghosts going around -- ghosts in poo, ghosts in ghosts in ghosts in people, ghosts wandering the earth (’tis the season, after all)… :) I’m just going to enjoy the lovely shades of the jacaranda blossom.
Yeah, perhaps it best not to. All kinds of ghosts including holey ghosts, enough of them.
I love those carpets of dropped blossoms. Around the corner from our previous home, the street was lined with quite a few jacarandas as well as the deep, brilliant red Illawarra flame trees which flower at much the same time. Glancing down the street there were alternating pools of cool violet blue and clear vibrant red along the footpaths below in the shade and above in the sunlight.
The gold flowered silky oaks were also blooming at this time, but they were less inclined to lay down a colourful carpet. (They’re more inclined to drop foliage year in year out, worse than some eucalypts.) If you want gold(ish) to balance the violet and red, the best bet is native frangipani , it’s more of a creamy yellow from a distance and politely keeps most of its foliage to itself for most of the year.
Oh wow that flame tree.
Also the frangipani seems to be growing in a vague bulbous spiral shape, it looks quite distinctive.
Yeah, hymenosporums are really nice street trees. There’s a whole row of them down part of our daughter’s street in North Adelaide. They’re a rainforest tree, but they do really well here in arid Adelaide -- though they may not be as lush as in their home territory. Maybe that’s better -- less lush foliage means less competition for the flowering display perhaps.
Illawarra flame trees are spectacular but even in their home ground they can take 10 to 15 years to get to flowering stage.