A jacaranda: making the blue summer sky even bluer

Nobody experiences the purple light of the blossoms as totally as the bee inside her petal trumpet

It is what jacarandas do to blue sky that makes us so helpless to resist them. They emerge in early summer, when we hope the skies will be bluest, and make them bluer still. “The jacaranda flames on the air like a ghost,” the Australian poet Douglas Stewart wrote, “Like a purer sky some door in the sky has revealed.”

Their blossoms fall, turning the ground to the sky, like still water reflecting clouds, and in the middle is us, bobbing happily up and down.