Yay! It’s that time of year when Pretoria and Jozi’s streets turn purple again.
Pretoria, South Africa (04 October 2025) – The jacarandas are out, and honestly, it’s one of the highlights for anyone who drives the cities’ canopied streets. They add a touch of magic here that can’t be found anywhere else in SA, or at least not in the numbers that we have them in Gauteng.
But do you know the story behind these blooming jacarandas? They’re actually not indigenous to South Africa.
They came from Brazil more than 100 years ago, Durban got the first ones in the early 1800s, and Pretoria followed in the 1880s. Two of the oldest trees still stand in Sunnyside today.
When the Union Buildings were being built in the early 1900s, the city was also modernising its infrastructure. Old trees had to be removed to make way for new sewerage systems. Instead of leaving streets bare, the Pretoria Council handed out jacaranda saplings for free to residents. People planted them in their gardens and along pavements, and before long, entire streets bursted with purple.
That’s how Pretoria earned its nickname, Jacaranda City.
Today there are about 65,000 mature jacaranda trees across the city. They all flower at once on bare branches, which is why the bloom always seems to come out of nowhere like a surprise. And while we might think of them as Pretoria’s pride, Johannesburg actually has even more.
There are even rare white-flowering jacarandas near Jan Cilliers Park and Wonderboom if you know where to look.
The University of Pretoria (UP) alone is home to over 200 trees, some of which were transplanted during the Bus Rapid Transit project and are still thriving.
Jason Sampson, who heads the botanical gardens at UP, says jacarandas are some of the toughest.
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Pests aren’t really partial to them, and so they’ve stood the test of time as an invasive species. They’re actually one of the few invasive species given an exclusion clause, meaning they can still be planted in urban areas. That’s why they’ve remained such an iconic part of Pretoria.
Like all trees in cities, though, they do face challenges. Paving around their bases stops rainwater from reaching the roots. Old age and heavy pruning also weaken them, making them vulnerable to disease.
In the end, they are strong and resilient.
They remind me of us, as South Africans, and perhaps even broader than that, as human beings.
A beautiful passage, one of my favourites, from Herman Hesse’s 1920 collection ‘Wandering: Notes and Sketches’ comes to mind. Like the jacarandas, all trees seem to hold a quiet wisdom. Hesse describes them as ‘preachers’ who teach us that life is about steady growth, withstanding tough storms, and blooming, in time, just as we are and as we’re meant to be.
They remind us that even in struggle, there’s strength, and even in stillness, there’s purpose.
Hesse says it beautifully:
“Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
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