Jacaranda

Looking up Ruben Dario, jacaranda in the background

Canadian winter is not the only reason we like to come to Mexico City in March. We love being here when the city’s iconic “purple trees”, the jacarandas, are in bloom. For northerners like us, the very idea of a purple-flowering full-size tree is astonishing, and enchanting.

Jacarandas are street trees, and park trees, sometimes featured in special formal plantings like the Alameda park in the historical center of the city, but also — as right here where we are staying — they grow in people’s gardens. Jacarandas aren’t small trees, either, as you can see in the sketch at the top.

This is a street tree, seen from the roof terrace of the building we’re living in. The brown hanging things are seed pods.

I haven’t been successful in painting these beautiful trees or their flowers before, so this time, I picked some flowers and also one of the tree’s fascinating seed pods, which are hard as wood.

Unfortunately, I had only brought my smallest travel palette, with just 12 half pans of watercolor. Though I tried my best, there was no way to mix the right shade of purple/violet. After the attempt above, I did some research and went off to the local art supply store, where I bought a tube of Winsor-Newton “Winsor Violet.” It yielded much better results.

The color was close, but the frilly flowers proved to be devilishly hard to paint!

The final painting yesterday was the street scene at the top of the post, which captures pretty successfully the feeling of one of Mexico City’s large avenues near Chapultepec Park, jacarandas upstaging everything else in this spring season. It also gave me more confidence about portraying the incredible complexity of vegetation that surrounds us here.