Trees are not treated well in this metropolis, a situation that doesn’t seem to bother too many people. But the jacaranda is popular enough, if only for its showy pre-spring display, that it could spearhead an arboreal liberation movement. Assuming, of course, that somebody sees fit to start one.
The species that settled in here is, formally, the Jacaranda mimosifolia. The second word, the species name, means the leaves are shaped like the mimosa (the tree, not the Sunday brunch cocktail).
Jacaranda, the genus name, is also the common name here as well as the United States and elsewhere. It’s pronounced in Mexico much like in English, but with softer, European vowels, the tapped “r” of Spanish and the initial “j” like an aspirated English “h” but more so.
The generally accepted origin of the genus name is an indigenous Brazilian place name Latinized to “Jacarancy.” But in her book “Árboles y áreas verdes urbanas,” which describes most of the common trees, native and imported, in the greater Mexico City urban area, biologist Lorena Mártinez, who runs the urban green space education program at Parque Xochitla in Tepozotlán, State of Mexico, gives us a more pleasing possibility:
“It’s also said that it comes from the word jácara, or its relative, which refers to an evening round [as in song] for happy people, from which the word ‘jacarandoso’ [lively] is derived, reflecting the size and showiness of the species.”
(Botanists like to assign personalities to trees, unofficially. Willows are sad, ahuehuetes are holy, or just plain old, and jacarandas are vivacious.)
FROM VERACRUZ TO CONDESA AND ROMA, LIVING HISTORY IN A TREE
Jacaranda mimosifolia entered Mexico at Veracruz at the dawn of the last century and was later introduced up in Mexico City, most notably in what are now known as Parque México and Parque España in the then-newly developing neighborhoods of Condesa and Roma.
“Those two colonias literally grew up with the jacaranda, which was almost the only tree there at the beginning,” says Martínez, whom we met in the first installment of this jacaranda journal, which you can see here if you missed it. “The jacarandas carry with them the history of those neighborhoods.”
Around the time the jacarandas arrived, the first modern movement to re-tree Mexico City was starting. Its leader was a public official named Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, whose name adorns a major thoroughfare in the Coyoacán neighborhood that runs near the botanical nursery garden (viveros) he established. Prescient and ambitious, Quevedo saw what urban trees could do to offset the future negative effects of the automobile, and the dusty conditions marking a city built on a dried lake bed.
He went to work planting native trees from what was left of the surrounding forests – pines, oaks, ahuehuetes, cedars. They all died. So he traveled abroad to search for trees that seemed to thrive in soil similar to what covered the capital. Thus began the predominance of imported trees in Mexico City, with acacias, eucalyptuses and others joining the jacaranda.
Quevedo’s efforts were admirable, but insufficient to overcome Mexico City’s population explosion of the second half of the 20th century. Today, Martínez says, the metropolis has less than a fifth of the green space recommended by the World Health Organization, and that includes soccer fields and other open spaces that don’t do much good from an environmental point of view.
“There are much fewer trees in the Mexico City area than there were a few decades ago,” Martínez says. “We are doing very poorly.”
LEAVE TREES ALONE? BAD IDEA. PAINT THEM WHITE? WORSE.
What it comes down to is we don’t have enough trees, and the ones we have are poorly cared for, by authorities and the public alike.
“A lot of people think that trees grow best if you just leave them alone,” Martínez says. “For urban trees, that´s an Alice in Wonderland way of looking at it. They need attention.”
That means, among other things, planting the right species in the right places, “raising” the young trees in a nursery first so they can be transplanted at a decent size, pruning them properly, and seeking a mix between long-lived trees such as pines, oaks and the revered Mexican native ahuehuete (all of whose lifespans are measured in centuries), and the more visually pleasing short-lived species.
The latter category includes the jacaranda, which in urban conditions lives about half a century.
But the major official intervention, besides hacking at public land trees in the name of pruning, seems to be the antiquated practice of spraying the lower trunk with limestone powder mixed with the juice of nopal cactus. Thus the poor creatures are garbed in white calcetines, a play on words from the Spanish for lime (cal) and socks (calcetines). The motive is supposed to be blight prevention, but the one clear result is the visual cutting of the trees in half, an aesthetic insult.
“It really doesn’t help much,” Martínez says of the spraying. “It’s mostly to give the idea that by spraying it on, you’re taking care of the trees.”
Lorena Martínez and other promoters of the urban treescape have science on their side, but still face an uphill battle. Their cause is appreciated, but often dismissed in policymaking circles as dreamy and not entirely serious. Martínez is encouraged by growing movements to protect native plants and restore native ecologies, but she’s not a native-only advocate when it comes to urban trees.
“That´s a myth,” she says. “We need a mix of the native and the exotic. If we only had native trees, we wouldn’t have the jacaranda.”
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