Purple Trees and Reflections of Eden

When I was a very little girl, I had a preschool teacher that wouldn't let me color the trees purple. Mrs. Billings said, "We must color trees green because trees ARE green." Purple crayons were reserved for carebears, eggplants, and parts of rainbows. I think, in hindsight, that the imagination of poor Mrs. Billings must have have been seriously undernourished. She just couldn't find it within herself to believe in purple trees; but as a small, fanciful child, even after submitting to the "green tree rule," I still held out hope that somewhere, purple trees really did exist.

On our morning bike rides, we drive past dozens of wisteria-purple "Jacaranda" trees. I love living in a place where reality is just as vivid and colorful as my imagination. Australians seem to take the Jacaranda for granted. Many think the Jacaranda quite ordinary, but I think each one is a miracle. Every Jacaranda tree seems to me like something from the other side of the rainbow, something from the land of dragons and elfs, that has accidentally wandered over.

Imagine a tree as tall as a live oak (35 ft or 6.5 m tall). In your mind, where you would usually see the vivid green of spring foliage, replace it with purple blooms so thick that they cast a blue light under the shade of the tree. Riding along the bike path into the shade of a jacaranda is like riding suddenly from bright sunlight into bright moonlight and back again where the shade ends. Seeing them in bloom every morning is truly magical, and I am actually glad that I had to wait so long to see my first long-awaited purple tree. Honestly, if I had seen them earlier in life, I would be truly disappointed not to see unicorns grazing in the fields nearby.

I am clearly a tree-lover (I even love green trees), and there is a part of a verse about trees in the Garden of Eden that I have always loved. In Genesis three it reads, "Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day. . ." When I look at the t.v. or the Internet, I struggle to believe that a perfect place, created for mankind, ever existed. When I watch the news, I see only war, rumors of war, abuse, genocide, and hopelessness. There is just so much evil in our world. The holiness of Eden has been shattered into a million pieces like a smashed mirror.

The despair all around can be so thick, but when I step into the broad-day moonlight under a jacaranda tree, I begin to regain hope for the redemption of this old, broken-down world, and for my own heart. Every morning, the Jacaranda tree reminds me that I still see reflections of Eden when I look for them, and that if I listen hard as the wind gently brushes past the purple trees, I can still hear the sound of God as he moves through the cool of the day.

The Jacaranda is the lavender purple tree under which Jordan is standing with her bike. The hot pink tree in the foreground is a rhododendron, I think.