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Where was the purple splendor of spring this year?

By SUE CARLTON
Published June 2, 2006

Somehow, it happened without my noticing.

Spring has melted into almost-summer and hurricane season is back to bully us again. Already we're risking second-degree burns just grabbing the car steering wheel. The grass has gone crispy.

How was I supposed to remember to appreciate spring without the jacaranda trees to remind me?

I should have started noticing them a month or so ago. They should have demanded to be noticed.

In April and May, the tall, wide trees from South America burst out everywhere in a wild riot of purple flowers, especially around St. Petersburg, where lots of them were planted in the 1960s.

Sometimes the trees bloom up so electric lavender-blue you want to pull your car over just to rest your eyes on them. Tree services get calls from out-of-towners wanting to know the name of those pretty purple ones.

"It's a very showy tree," said Andy Wilson, horticulturist with the Pinellas County Extension. "It's kind of our own little spring thing. We don't have the swallows coming back to Capistrano, but we do have the jacarandas."

Sure, they bloomed this year, some nicely. But was it me, or did fewer of them catch your eye?

Somehow they didn't paint the greenery along Interstate 275 as vividly as before. Those messy carpets of lavender that fall across sidewalks and lawns - pretty, unless you're the guy who has to clean them up - just weren't as lush. The blooms that dropped from the jacaranda behind the North East Park Baptist Church didn't decorate the church bus parked below like they usually do.

Where had all the flowers gone?

I felt like Chicken Little - or maybe Al Gore - even asking the question, but authoritative plant-and-tree-types confirmed my suspicions.

"They're definitely not as spectacular," said Spencer Curtis, horticulturist with the Pinellas County Extension. "I've seen a handful of trees here doing what they normally do."

"You're right," said city urban forester Guntis Barenis. "I've been riding around the city of St. Petersburg, and I haven't seen them."

"I just recently began wondering the same thing, thinking, 'Gee, I don't remember seeing all the jacaranda trees in bloom this year,' " said Wilson.

What? No spectacular showy display, in a town that 40 years ago so publicly professed its love of the jacaranda? A town that declared April 24, 1966, Jacaranda Sunday? A town that decreed it the city's Official Flowering Tree besting the Jerusalem thorn and the golden rain tree?

The plant-and-tree types said they suspect the recent drought may have something to do with this year's quieter show. We hadn't had a good, satisfying rain-soaking in a while. Apparently trees notice this.

"Trees are good at allocating their resources, and the jacarandas this year I think are using their energy for the leaf and root systems," said Jeff Boen of Boen's Tree Service.

"Probably they're looking for a little more water," Curtis said.

And don't forget Mother Nature, some of them reminded me. She's all about cycles. Some years, fruit trees produce better crops than others. Some years, trees flower better.

Ten years ago, the Times wrote about a glorious jacaranda spring, blooms as beautiful as anyone could recall (including a horticulturist who had been watching them come and go for 40 years.) Tree people talked about an especially chilly winter and a nice wet summer.

"My back yard is not green. It's lavender,'' a St. Pete resident told a reporter then. "It looks like lavender snow. I love it."

As I write this, a strange wet substance is falling from the sky outside my window. Rain! For a little while, anyway.

So we'll sweat out hurricanes, enjoy fall, endure the mild chill of another Florida winter. Maybe by next spring, if nature decides it's time, we'll see purple everywhere all over again.

Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com.

[Last modified June 2, 2006, 05:35:14]