WOW Factor: Jacaranda Time Again [] Bonnie Lee Black

Published February 26, 2022

by Bonnie Lee Black

This week while visiting my friend Kharin here in San Miguel, I looked up from admiring her lovely terrace garden to see a jacaranda tree in bloom in the distance. It was my first jacaranda-in-bloom sighting of the season. I wanted to dance around her terrace and sing “It’s jacaranda time again!” Bliss.

When I lived in southern Africa in my mid-twenties, I learned that springtime there was known as “jacaranda time.” Majestic jacaranda trees lined the broad avenues of the capital — then Salisbury, Rhodesia, now Harare, Zimbabwe — and came into bloom in October and November each year, which is springtime in the southern hemisphere.

The city of Salisbury when I lived there (from 1969 to 1972) was rightly and proudly known as “the city of flowering trees.” There were flame-red flamboyants, delicate-pink mimosas, and sunny-yellow cassias, among the many other colorful tropical flowering trees lining the streets. But I was most captivated by the jacarandas.

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