Jacarandas are beautiful but high maintenance - is brief show worth it?; Riverside, CA

Fussing, fawning over jacarandas, which beautify neighborhoods -- until cleanup time | Inland News | PE.com | Southern California News | News for Inland Southern California

11:58 AM PDT on Wednesday, June 10, 2009
By DARRELL R. SANTSCHI
The Press-Enterprise
The jacarandas are in bloom.
A common sight along streets and in yards across the Inland region, the jacaranda produces thousands of blossoms that bloom for two or three days, then float gently to the ground like tiny purple parachutes.
But when they hit the sidewalk, the street or the front yard, they can be a mess to clean up.
"There is a famous saying in the tree world," said Robert Filiar, an urban forester for Riverside's Public Works Department. "These are regarded more highly as long as they're on someone else's property."
Some 4,000 of Riverside's 115,000 street trees are jacarandas, he says, and the city will replace them when the trees die. But city crews won't plant them in new neighborhoods.
"The entire canopy will bloom," he said. "Eventually it all comes down. If you have an old, established tree that is 30 or 40 years old, it could leave a pretty good pile on the street."