Spring is always one of our favourite times of year in Gauteng as we are treated to one of South Africa’s most glorious natural phenomena – the blossoming of tens of thousands of jacaranda trees.
Pretoria is famously known as the ‘Jacaranda City’ with some estimates saying the city has as many as 70,000 jacaranda trees! Joburg too has its fair share of these purple blossoming trees, mostly found lining the streets of the city’s older suburbs such as Westcliff, Parktown, Melrose, Parkwood, Yeoville and Kensington. Whether you are in Joburg or Pretoria, when these trees finally burst into colour is a special month for taking a walk through the suburbs and admiring the lilac splendour.
#JacarandaInYourPocket 2020 photo competition
To celebrate the arrival of the jacaranda season, each year we host our #jacarandainyourpocket photo competition, asking you, our readers to share their best photos of Joburg’s jacarandas with us.
As we prepare to launch our new Gauteng In Your Pocket website this month, in 2020 we are making the competition even bigger, inviting our readers in Pretoria to share their best shots of the jacarandas in bloom too!
Linking up Gauteng’s two great cities, Joburg and Pretoria, we are also partnering with the Gautrain in this year’s competition, encouraging jacaranda fans to travel between neighbouring cities and make the most of the jacaranda spring.
Our competition officially launches next week when we will also be announcing the exciting prizes that are up for grabs this year’s winners!.
Keep your eye on our Instagram page for the big announcement in the coming days and start sharing snaps with us with the hashtag #jacarandainyourpocket! We will announce any additional hashtags to be added next week.
Jacaranda events
Throughout the jacaranda season in addition to our photo competition we will also be sharing lots of details about jacaranda related events happening in the region, such as guided walks or picnics etc, that you can get involved in. You can keep up to speed with all these events here.