Every jacaranda in Lisbon can be traced back to this garden.
Blue Jacaranda
Jacaranda mimosifolia
For a few weeks a year a jacaranda stops looking like any other tree, its whole crown turning violet-blue and the ground beneath carpeting in the same colour when the flowers drop, which is why cities from Pretoria to Sydney planted it far outside its native Argentina and Bolivia. We map 4 of them, in 4 cities.
Cagliari's specimen in the Giardini Pubblici does this every May among trees chosen for shade rather than spectacle. Cordoba's grew inside a walled garden that belonged first to a Dominican convent and then to a Renaissance palace, invisible from the street until the gate finally opened to the public in 2004. Sydney's is the odd one out: the jacaranda that made the University of Sydney's Quadrangle famous fell in 2016 after 88 years, and the tree standing there now is a clone planted the following year, carrying the same genetics and almost none of the age.
Lisbon
Cagliari
For a few weeks each May this tree stops being green.
Sydney
In bloom
The jacaranda in the Quadrangle is about nine years old.
Cordoba
For four hundred years nobody outside could see this tree.
Explore by city: Lisbon · Cagliari · Sydney · Cordoba · Prague · Brussels · Porto · Brisbane · every city · or browse all species.