Jacaranda Journey Provides Purple Haze

Mrs. Kangaeroo and I woke up early, let the dinosaur roam free for a while to stretch her wings, then headed off to Atami for one of Japan’s few jacaranda festivals.

We’ve got a jacaranda in our garden and it has proven to be pretty fickle, so I was very interested to see how more experienced, more skillful gardeners such as those good enough to hold a festival centered on the trees would handle the South American natives.

And it was interesting, indeed, because the 100-odd trees the city has grown in the 34 years since being presented with a pair of jacaranda from its Portuguese sister-city, Cascais.

(My memories of of Atami are always colored by it being the location I was in when the Berlin Wall came crashing down back in 1989, pre-dating the jacaranda, but something that I always remember when I come to the seaside city.)

Of greatest hope for me was that many of the trees were not in bloom. The blokes manning the tables at the festival (which in itself has no festivities as such, other than looking beautiful in their beachfront setting, and some trees being floodlit at night) said that it is not uncommon for jacaranda not to flower.

Our jacaranda bloomed in its first year, three years ago, and I expected the same thereafter. It hasn’t happened. But knowing the same thing happened to trees in a jacaranda festival gave me hope.

In her first winter, we got a couple of days where the temperature dropped to -7 and -8 degrees, respectively, on consecutive days, and we thought the tree, notoriously fickle in frosts, was a goner.

But she held on and the tree thrived last year.

I expected the tree to bloom this year and it hasn’t happened.

But heading to the festival, I learned that many people struggle with jacaranda and they’re not the easy to grow trees that I had believed they were.

It gave me so much hope in my still shallow journey through the world of gardening and I will strive to take a more patient approach with our tree, which is certainly thriving even if there are no flowers on it.

We got to see lots of other familiar plants blooming with the jacaranda, many of which evoked thoughts of Kangaeroo Corner, including the banksia (which included a superb specimen), dodonea (Australian native hops), grevillea, bottlebrush and protea. Also delightful were the beautiful bougainvillea growing across the Itogawa river running through the city. It was a delightful explosion of color.