This is a pleasant place, but there are various things wrong with it. My room is ludicrously small, even for a ‘boutique’ hotel. There’s no bath, only a shower which leaks. And, worst of all, there’s no BBC World News on the tiny television set. In the usual way these are all the kind of failings that would incline me to repack my stuff and set out to look for somewhere better.
But I won’t. I don’t stay here so much for the hotel itself, as for what lies just outside it: the gentle, complicated shape of an immense jacaranda tree overshadowing the hotel. Every year, in March and early April, it is even more magnificent. The entire room is filled with the glorious purple glow of a jacaranda in blossom.
Mexico City is a splendid city in its own right, but once a year, in the spring, it becomes magical. Over avenues and side streets, parks and gardens and patches of waste ground, there hover clouds of shimmering, delicate mauve as the jacaranda season begins. I don’t even like the colour, unless it comes in this form. But when it does, it’s one of the finest sights on the planet.
Plenty of places boast about this, I have found. Australia is proud of its jacarandas and so is California. You find good examples in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, Argentina, Paraguay and Chile, and people there all think they put on a good show. But you haven’t seen jacarandas at their best until you’ve been to four cities: Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg and, the best of all, Harare.
I suppose we had better define our terms. The jacaranda is officially a genus of some 49 species of flowering plants in the family of Bignoniaceae, which sounds like an even bigger and more unpronounceable family than my own, and a lot more colourful. Blue jacarandas, the kind I prefer to almost every other tree in creation (except possibly the oaks of my native Suffolk in the east of England), seem to have their origin in and around the Parana Valley in Brazil. I may never have set foot on the ground there, but I have flown over it in jacaranda blossom time, in a plane so small and rickety I thought I might soon find myself examining the trees from close up but fortunately not.
Jacarandas bloom for only a few weeks in the spring, and their blossoms, which are like English bluebells only bigger, fall like blue snow and lie on the ground in a crisp blue carpet. Instinctively you find yourself trying to avoid stepping on them, but when you inevitably do, they crackle under your feet because they are firm and crisp, even in death. Afterwards the trees show their lovely shapes again, broad and spreading and open with a handsome greyish bark and branches that invite you to climb them. Best not to, though, unless you are still under 12 – they are notoriously brittle and may land you heavily on the ground.
How do I know all this? Because I was once the proud owner or, at any rate, the leaser, of a fine, mature, fruitful jacaranda when I was the BBC correspondent in Johannesburg, almost a lifetime ago. My two little daughters, who seemed to me to be as delicate and beautiful as jacaranda blossom themselves, danced under the blue rain and cried when I drove over the plangent bells, though even they agreed that since the tree was outside the garage it was pretty much impossible to avoid doing it.
Our family cat, a lithe Abyssinian, once swarmed up the jacaranda tree when it was in blossom and sorted out a much larger, wild civet cat which had taken refuge in the branches. The yowling and hissing went on for much of the night, and our poor cat came down in the morning with his ears in shreds and his face bleeding. Still, he’d won. The civet vanished and never returned. To this day, I cannot look up at a jacaranda in blossom without thinking of poor old Minos.
Alas, jacarandas don’t blossom in colder climates, so there is no point in my trying to transplant one to our garden in Chelsea. But my strange way of life as a journalist has taken me undercover half a dozen times in the last year or so to Harare, in long-suffering Zimbabwe, where the jacarandas line the avenues – or is it the streets, which run at right angles to the avenues? I can never remember, but what I do know is that one way has magnificent flame trees and the other way has even more magnificent jacarandas. I’m on my way there next, from one jacaranda capital to another, and if I am caught while I’m there I shall say with all honesty that part of my reason for going there illegally was to see some of the finest jacarandas in existence. No jury, I’m sure, will convict.
But until I leave to go there, I have the pleasure of being here in Mexico City. It has everything to recommend it, except a perplexing lack of antique shops. But apart from that it has grandeur and magnificence, and a cultural life which ensures that its identity remains thoroughly distinct from that of its assertive northern neighbour.
And of course it has its jacarandas, which once a year touch the city with a cerulean hue, and which seem just as native to the place as its bars and bullrings and its street Aztecs selling their Santa Muertes and their strange ceramic heads which, perversely, have the skulls on the outside opening up to show the autochthonous faces inside.
I love it here. One day maybe I’ll spend a year living in Mexico City. I’ll arrive in spring, when the jacarandas are just coming into bloom, and leave a year later, just as the next lot of blossoms start to fall. Assuming I’m not watching the show from behind bars in Harare, that is.
John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on BBC World News, available in 200 countries and territories worldwide, and on selected British Airways flights.
