As Sydney poet Warren Paul Glover walked his dogs under jacaranda trees, he couldn’t shake the imagery of the spent flowers left on the ground. Those images inspired his poem Jacaranda Season. It celebrates the trees’ carpet bombs: a “deciduous delight” of “lilac lethality” on “pedestrian foot soldiers” who “march through the purple parade”.
To mark this year’s season in Sydney, Brisbane and Grafton, where the 90th annual jacaranda festival celebrating its 2000 trees began on Friday, the Herald is launching the 2024 Purple Prize for Poetry. Purple patch in Paddington: Warren Paul Glover is a poet who wrote about jacarandas in Jacaranda Season . Credit: Dylan Coker Write a poem in any style about the jacaranda in fewer than 50 words and you could win a jacaranda tree of your own.
Submit it to editor@smh.com.au by Tuesday 9am AEDT.
Sydney’s oldest jacaranda in the Royal Botanic Garden is now in flower, and social media posts about jacarandas have gone “petalistic”. Native to Brazil and introduced to Australia from the 1850s, the trees across Sydney are now budding, blooming or patched with green. At one of Sydney’s most popular and Instagrammable spots, Kirribilli’s McDougall Street where the trees line the road next to the waterside Milson Park, the trees have begun flowering, but not all are in full bloom, a council spokesperson said.
At peak jacaranda, some roads will be closed to cars at weekends. Council said there had been an increase in fo.