Why Mexico City Turns Purple Every Spring: The Jacaranda Story

In 1930, a Mexican president wanted his capital to look like Washington, D.C. in cherry blossom season. He got a purple city instead. The man responsible for the switch had spent forty years building a career on knowing which trees would survive in Mexican soil.

The gardener from Shinagawa

Tatsugoro Matsumoto was born in 1864 in Shinagawa, a gardening district on the edge of Tokyo, and by twenty he’d earned the title of niwa-shi, master gardener. He left Japan for Peru, then arrived in Mexico in 1890, brought in by a Mexican mining engineer named José de Landero who’d seen his work abroad. Porfirio Díaz, president at the time, eventually put him in charge of the gardens at Chapultepec Castle, and Matsumoto stayed in Mexico for the rest of his life, running plant nurseries across the states of México, Morelos, Puebla, and Veracruz and a flower shop on Calle Colima in the Roma neighborhood. He died in Mexico City in 1955, at ninety-one. Florería Matsumoto, the shop he opened, is still open today at Colima 92, now run by his great-granddaughter.

By the time President Álvaro Obregón asked him to help beautify Mexico City after the Revolution, Matsumoto had already spent three decades learning what would and wouldn’t grow at 7,350 feet above sea level.

A president who wanted cherry blossoms

The problem arrived a few years later, under President Pascual Ortiz Rubio. Washington, D.C. had received a gift of Japanese cherry trees in 1912 that had become, by the 1930s, one of the city’s signature spring attractions. Ortiz Rubio wanted the same thing for Mexico City, and asked the Japanese government to send sakura the way they’d sent them to the United States.

Matsumoto told him it wouldn’t work. Cherry trees, he explained, need a sharp seasonal swing from cold winter into warm spring to trigger blooming, a shock that Mexico City’s mild, relatively stable winters don’t provide. Plant them, and they’d likely never flower.

What Mexico City got instead

Matsumoto had an alternative already growing in his nurseries: jacaranda, a tree native to South America, not Japan, that he’d imported seeds for years earlier because he liked its color. Its lavender-purple blossoms weren’t Japanese cherry blossoms, but from a distance, and covering a whole street, they created something close to the same effect. Mexico City’s dry late-winter climate, he pointed out, would make the blooms last longer than cherry blossoms typically do.

The first jacarandas went into the ground on Calle Veracruz, in Condesa, sometime in the early 1930s. “He fell in love with the jacaranda tree and its beautiful lavender purple color,” his grandson Ernesto Matsumoto later told the outlet Mexico News Daily, which has documented the family’s account in detail. From that one street, plantings expanded through the following decades into the tens of thousands of jacarandas now growing across the city, along Paseo de la Reforma, through Parque México and Parque España in Condesa, and into Roma, Coyoacán, and dozens of other neighborhoods.

Where to see it now

The bloom runs roughly from late February through March, though the exact timing shifts year to year with the weather. For a few weeks, entire avenues turn violet overhead, and Reforma’s stretch between the Centro Histórico and Chapultepec Park is usually the most photographed corridor in the city. Visitors and residents alike show up with cameras for the same reason people plan trips around Washington’s cherry blossoms. Except here, the tree on display was never supposed to be the point. It was the backup plan.

Sources: Mexico News Daily’s reporting on the Matsumoto family history; Discover Nikkei, the Japanese American National Museum’s journal on Japanese diaspora history, which has separately documented Tatsugoro Matsumoto’s career in Mexico.