Those Blooming Jacarandas

Every year in Sydney I wait for four events with regards to our local flora. The first is when the Moreton Bay fig trees drop their fruits. This is a terrible time because your car paint work easily gets stained with the fruit marks if you don't wash it off and then accidentally bake it the following day in the hot sun. The second thing I wait for is the fragrant smell sometime in spring of wisteria. It for me is the big mark that winter is over. The fragrance that permeates the air takes me back to years ago when the nights were so charming and seemingly endless and I wasn't in a rush to do one thing or another - those years when you still have time to soak it all in. The third thing I wait for is the blooming of the jacarandas which always casts my mind to a Clive James documentary on Hamlet where he talks about sitting underneath the jacaranda in the main quadrangle at Sydney University reading Shakespeare. Underneath the same tree, many years later, I read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. When that quadrangle has the greenest trimmed grass and a lofty breeze blows through the corridors of that impressive sandstone structure there is nothing quite like reading under that jacaranda. And the final thing  I wait for is the frangipanis. This is the final sign that summer is in full throttle and when those frangipanis turn to mush on the ground you know you are not far off the summer ending. These are the things I look forward to for the Sydney summer.

But more importantly, the reason that I post is that there seems to me to be an unprecedented bloom in jacarandas this season and it is very inspiring for someone who likes textiles as I can't help but feel that it deserves to be turned into a silk - I am just not sure that I have the skill to translate it. Nothing can replicate nature's beauty - although some, like Antoni Gaudi, do come close. I might give it a nudge but I cannot work out how express such detail in such a confined space.

Click to expand. Jacarandas are having a big bloom in Sydney this year.