A gardener has come out swinging against haters of jacaranda trees after some suggested the trees’ dropping flowers make Aussie footpaths slippery, and they should be chopped down and removed from Aussie suburbs.
Jacarandas are renowned for their colourful impact on parks and streets in many parts of Australia every spring, with their flowers creating a stark contrast against blue skies and increasingly green shrubbery. However, after being in bloom for only four to six weeks, the flowers start to wilt and fall off branches, blanketing walkways and roads.
Gardener and nursery owner Tim Pickles told Yahoo News he’s started hearing “ridiculous” complaints about jacaranda flowers being slippery on footpaths and said the negative rhetoric about them needs to stop.
“People call tree leaves or flowers [on the ground] a mess, but it’s not a mess; it’s nature. And nature can be slippery sometimes,” he told Yahoo News. “It isn’t even specific to jacarandas, either.
“Roses have thorns, but we don’t go, OK, don’t plant roses, we just learn that they have thorns.”
Have you slipped or fallen on Jacaranda flowers? Contact sophie.coghill@yahooinc.com
Gardener praises jacarandas’ impressive survival skills
While jacarandas have become synonymous with spring in Australia, the species is actually an introduced one and is considered an invasive weed in some parts of the country, including NSW and Queensland.
Luke Mosely from Gympie and District Landcare told Yahoo this week that jacarandas “outcompete native species” and pointed to their impressive ability to self-seed as a problem.
“They do flower in high numbers, that’s obviously why they look so nice, but because they produce a lot of seed, they are wind and water dispersal, so they can get into ecosystems quite easily,” Mosely explained.
However, while Tim also champions native plants, he argued that ‘a tree is better than no tree’ and said that at the rate at which trees are being cut down in Australia, we need to embrace every bit of help.
“There’s backlash against trees that just pop up from their ability to self-seed,” he said. “We’re chopping down trees, then getting annoyed that the trees are planting themselves. If we didn’t have nature working like this, the planet would be so hot,” he said.
Trees help to drastically reduce the Urban Heat Island Effect by providing shade and cooling surfaces, which in turn significantly benefits public health. Parallel streets in western Sydney were found to have a 20-degree temperature difference simply because one was lined with trees, and the other was not, with the lack of tree cover significantly impacting the health of residents.
While some are against Jacarandas, many, like Tim, are huge fans and even host festivals to celebrate their bloom, like the Grafton Jacaranda Festival which is currently taking place in northern NSW until November 2.
“We see Jacarandas as weeds, but it’s actually our failure. We have more trees being chopped down than being planted; we need them to replace themselves.”
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