One of the few blue flowered trees that you might encounter, the Jacaranda is a semi-deciduous tree forming a rounded or oval canopy growing quickly to about 30' tall. By semi-deciduous I mean it loses its leaves late in spring for a very short time before growing new foliage. This is a picture of one at Cal Poly SLO at the hort center. They really bloom better inland with heat but ours do okay.
This is on Oceanview in SC, not bad.
The leaves are alternate, bipinnately compound, about 12" long with 13-25 pairs of lateral compound leaflets. There are also about the same number of leaflets. Each leaflet is about 1/2" long. Albizia has similar leaves but shorter.
Branching is layered with the ends of the branches arching up.
Flowers are blue, 1-2" long, tubular, in 6-12" long terminal clusters in June. Very attractive.
Fruit is pretty cool looking, sort of a flat round pod, about 1 1/2 - 2" in diameter, splitting open to release lots of tiny winged seeds.
Misidentification: Albizia julibrissin has leaves sort of like this, but the Albizia leaves are smaller, the tree is smaller with layered flatted branches and totally different flowers, other than that they look alike, sort of.
Location:
Santa Cruz,
Lincoln St at Washington is a nice one.
Oceanview