In Johannesburg the jacaranda trees are in bloom again - which means I've been in SA for nearly a year, the seasons will start to repeat themselves from now on (though it still seems very strange for the weather to be getting hotter as we head towards Christmas - today I heard a Christmas carol in a shop; surreal.)
I'd never really thought about exactly what colour Jacaranda flowers are - but a poet said to me the other day in passing, "I'm still trying to work out what colour jacaranda is..." (this was Francesca Beard, who was here for work, check out her website - there's an MP3 archive of her performing her poems) - and this made me look more closely - and the answer is: it depends. Yesterday on the way back from work I drove through a storm along an avenue of jacaranda trees and they looked grey against a slate sky. With the sun behind them they're pale blue. In the morning light they're violet. They change all the time. But whatever the real colour is, they're wonderful, and they add an extra dimension to spring in South Africa.
(Above: taken from my balcony: electrical storm; the jacaranda at the end of my balcony, morning and evening.)
1 comment:
It might not be very cool to comment on my own blog, but I saw that Francesca has in fact come up with a definition of the colour jacaranda on her blog: "an impossibly joyous burst of colour on the landscape, dancing somewhere between powder blue and lavender with the frequency of pink". Well that's a hell of a lot better than I could ever have put it.
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