The Los Angeles Office of City Forestry Management’s map of all public trees.īrian Gallagher is a senior staff editor for The New York Times, based in California. All the senses are engaged.”Ī comprehensive report on the tree population of Los Angeles. “It’s an olfactory and aural experience, both ear and nose - and eye, also. Even as one walks over the fallen flowers, they often make a pleasant little popping sound as you tread over them,” he said. They have a very slight but definite scent. “Jacarandas are particularly appealing for pedestrians. The best way to enjoy the jacarandas, Waldie says, is not very L.A.: no Instagram and no car.
“All of a sudden, there’s a circle on the ground of these evenly spaced flowers that have just fallen naturally from the tree and created this carpet.” “It is stunning just to see that symmetry,” she said. Carrie said that around this time every year, her Instagram feed is awash with jacarandas.ĭespite the social media clout, jacarandas are not universally beloved, and any post marveling at their beauty will probably get comments on both their nonnative status and the irksome petals they drop at the end of their spring flourish.īut Malarich finds the fallen blooms part of the charm.
Rachel Malarich, the Los Angeles city forest officer, said the 19,182 publicly managed jacarandas are mostly in “fair to very good” condition despite the oldest ones potentially nearing the end of their normal life spans.Īnd it shows.
And yet here, in front of a quite ordinary house, you have this glorious blue, purple-blue interloper from the jungle.” “We tend to think of suburban places in the early ’50s as being uniform, and frankly kind of uninteresting places. “The developers of tract-house suburbs in Southern California planted very consciously an exotic tree,” Waldie told me. Waldie, an author whose memoir, “Holy Land,” chronicles growing up in Lakewood, one of the first planned communities in the United States, said the jacarandas were an advertisement for the place. Then, find a more permanent home for the plant outdoors or transfer to a larger pot-at least five gallons or more.Their proliferation coincided with the population boom of Los Angeles - which grew to 2.5 million people in 1960 from 576,000 in 1920 - and the blue of their flowers became a shade of the Southern California idea in the American imagination.ĭ.J. Allow the plant ample time to establish its root system. After that, do not transplant the cuttings for at least eight months.
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