Jacaranda is a genus of 49 species of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas and cultivated around the world. The generic name is also used as the common name.
The species Jacaranda mimosifolia has achieved a cosmopolitan distribution due to introductions, to the extent that it has entered popular culture. It can be found growing as an environmental weed in Central America, the Caribbean, Spain, Portugal, southern and northern Africa, China, Australia, Rwanda and Cyprus.
Etymology
The name is of South American (more specifically Tupi–Guarani) origin. The word jacaranda was described in A supplement to Mr. Chambers's Cyclopædia, 1st ed., (1753) as "a name given by some authors to the tree the wood of which is the log-wood, used in dyeing and medicine" and as being of Tupi–Guarani origin, by way of Portuguese. Although not consistent with the Guarani source, one common pronunciation of the name in English is given by /ˌdʒækəˈrændə/.
Description
The species are shrubs to large trees ranging in size from 20 to 30 m (66 to 98 ft) tall. Most of its species have bipinnate leaves, leaves on the rest are pinnate or simple. Their wood tissue has narrow vessels and splayed parenchyma.
Jacaranda flowers are produced in conspicuous large panicles, each flower with a five-lobed blue to purple-blue corolla; A few species have white flowers. Flowers of this genus's species differ from other genera in their family by having staminodes longer than the stamens that not only make the flowers more visually interesting to pollinators like orchid bees, but also have glandular trichomes secreting plant metabolites that attract those bees. Jacaranda flowers also have tricolpate pollen, and a chromosome number of 18.
The fruit is an oblong to oval flattened capsule containing numerous slender seeds, this trait is shared with other species in the Jacarandeae tribe.
