Jacaranda

 

Summer is coming in. This morning an enthusiastic man posts photographs on social media of blooming jacarandas in warmish Malvern, with the passing remark “When pronounced in my mother tongue (Javanese) jacaranda means ‘a widow’s young bachelor’”. Truly curvaceous are the etymological branches taken upon encounter with this curious definition, but then truly curvaceous are the time frames spent inside out of the heat of summer days. Jacarandas bloom in Brisbane in October, Sydney in November, and Melbourne in December, the trees feeling the heat as it moves down the coastline. It would be pleasant to think they bloomed in Java in September. This search is not helped by many hits for University College London’s Jacaranda System user’s guides, a computer software product implemented using Java language. Happily, a search on Google Image for ‘surabaya jacarandas’ delivers a mosaic of azure, mauve, violet, purple, and indigo, photographs of trees all taken in September. Nevertheless, jacarandas originate in South America. Merriam-Webster says the first known use of the word in English is 1753. Why, 1753? The word is Portuguese, but seems to have been taken from Tupi, a native language of Brazil: jacaraná or jacarandá. Emphasis on the final syllable is not common amongst Australians, as they laze out of the heat on their veranda. Which raises the question we ask of so many exotics, when did the jacaranda arrive in Australia? Before or after 1753? 1864 in Brisbane, according to a former curator of that city’s Botanic Gardens. In the 1850s, Queensland was sending wheat and grain to South America. Upon return, thy would unload at Kangaroo Point. The first curator, Walter Hill, rowed over to exchange seeds and plants with the sea captains. And thus he planted the first Australian jacaranda in his Gardens, that tree presumably the progenitor of hundreds more as humans and other forces of nature moved them down the coastline. Further curvaceous searches take us away from current reliable history into the 2020’s internet world of persistent and predictable headlines: ‘Jacarandas: icon or pest?’ I will save you time by summarising that jacarandas are iconic but not really a pest. Thank you for that. Just as well really, given that the common jacaranda in this country (mimosifolia) is a threatened species in its original habitat of Argentina and Bolivia, due to rapid land conversion to agriculture. Curves within curves. The unreliable history asks, were the seedpods brought to Australia by current? This thought bobs along in my mind as I reflect how the trees thrive here for the same climatic reasons they thrived for epochs on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, before 1753.