JACARANDA TIME

Here in Southern California, it’s jacaranda, or apparently more accurately jacaranda mimosifolia, time.

A gentle veil of soft, deep purple has settled all up and down the residential streets. In the morning, you find your car covered in a thin shroud of purple. It laughs purple, weeps purple, wakes and sleeps purple.

Back in the early ’90s, I worked for three years at a law office on the corner of Wilshire and Doheny in Beverly Hills. My principal emotion during those years was despair. One spring day I was in my boss’s sixth floor office and as he nattered on about the motion for relief from default I was to write one more time because, one more time, he’d ignored a deadline, I glanced out his windows and saw that all the streets north of Wilshire were blanketed in purple. It was jacaranda time! There was poetry, beyond the prison walls there was life! It was perhaps the one truly happy moment of my career as an attorney.

Looking back, that may have been the first moment I  knew I had to leave.

7 Replies to “JACARANDA TIME”

  1. Truly divine intoxication!!!Love you

  2. Anonymous says: Reply

    We have a few here in Phoenix but nothing like what you've got.

  3. Like! Very much like.

    Do you get lupines out on the gauche coast? Those are interesting flowers! Almost like floral pine-cones.

  4. The first and only time I've seen jacarandas was in Buenos Aires. They were astonishing! I took too many photos and fell in love with them. So nice to see your photos and remember that time.

  5. Anonymous says: Reply

    Beautiful purple.
    We have had so much rain, that even a "short"
    person like myself, has had to duck down or
    sweep away hanging leaves.

  6. Glad you all liked these…it's kind of a small, magical time each spring…we do get lupine: I've seen big sort of tall stands of it in the hills of Malibu (unlike the shorter version I'm used to back East). Lupine rocks, too!

  7. I always love when the jacaranda bloom in the Basin. Lovely! Similarly, I love when the red buds bloom in the South.

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