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The nearly 170-year-old jacaranda in Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden is flowering earlier than usual, attracting a steady flow of visitors, many of them accompanied by photographers to capture images for social media.
Since the first jacaranda arrived in Australia, the trees have set “socials” on fire. Word of the impending purple haze once spread by word of mouth, newspaper and telephone; now it fires up online, prompting a spike in Google searches from October.
Joyce Chen enjoys a jacaranda in Sydney’s botanic garden.Credit: Louise Kennerley
At the botanic garden on Thursday, Joyce Chen of Chatswood wore all white, with bracelets in her favourite colour, lilac, and posed while her friend, Jiaqi Ling, took photos.
“[We] caught the most beautiful moment,” Ling said of the jacaranda, which had begun flowering late last week and was now in full bloom.
Long before Instagram and TikTok, readers of newspapers were driven to jacaranda fandom, contributing thousands of poems about their purple flowers. The Herald’s online poetry competition last year attracted hundreds of entries.
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Lots of rain and some hot days this year resulted in the botanic garden’s tree showing its first flush of flowers on October 10. That compares with October 4 in 2023 and October 17 in 2024. In 2021 and 2022, its blooming dates were in November.
The garden’s acting curator manager, Daniella Pasqualini, said the trees, brought originally to Australia from South America, were deciduous in the northern hemisphere. In Australia’s temperate climate, they are considered semi-deciduous.
She said jacarandas were sensitive to their conditions, location and age. The tree in the botanic garden benefits from its aspect, looking north and getting full sun most of the day.
The garden has several jacarandas, in fact, including a Jacaranda mimosifolia “Alba” (White Jacaranda) planted in 1991. This variety was brought to Australia by doctor and plant collector George Hewitt in 1960.
As Pasqualini spoke, a group of tourists from China, including Li Ying, wearing a purple frock, and others dressed in long white dresses, twirled around in an impromptu dance in front of the old tree while the sole man in the group took photos.
Pasqualini and colleague Ella Williams, the garden’s communications manager, said the public appeared more interested in seasonal changes at the garden – such as seeing spring daffodils, or paper daisies at the botanic garden in Mount Annan – than they had in the past.
Royal Botanic Garden Sydney acting curator manager Daniella Pasqualini, with tourists enjoying the blooming jacaranda.Credit: Louise Kennerley
Williams said visitors would message: “OMG, are the daffodils really flowering?”
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Pasqualini added: “People are really excited waiting for things to pop. Many people have said it is exciting to have something outside the [bleak] news cycle, something that’s lovely and organic.”
In January, more than 27,000 people visited the garden’s putrid-smelling Corpse Flower (Amorphophallus titanum), while the livestream became a global event, attracting more than 1.7 million views internationally.
Jacarandas are blooming across Sydney, though flowering times will vary.
On the lower north shore, a popular spot for jacarandas, two streets will close to road traffic at weekends when the trees are in bloom: McDougall Street, between Clark Road and Willoughby Street, in Kirribilli; and Hipwood Street in North Sydney.
Other locations to enjoy the trees are streets in Strathfield, Woollahra, Camden, Parramatta, Hunters Hill and Double Bay, as well as Circular Quay’s First Fleet Park, Newlands Park at Wollstonecraft and McMahons Point near Wendy Whiteley’s Secret Garden.
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