This blooming city — Jacaranda In Your Pocket is a month-long love letter to Joburg

On 10 November, we’ll start to wrap up another season of purple blooms in Johannesburg. Each year since 2017, at Johannesburg In Your Pocket we’ve declared #JacarandaInYourPocket season from mid-October to mid-November – a month-long love letter to this city, captured through the lenses of hundreds of photographers. 

The competition produces the most spectacular imagery of Johannesburg, a city remade in violet haze. It should by now be a global tourist attraction. But let’s just say, the official backup for that idea has never quite bloomed. 

Spring in Joburg is when the giant, restless beast that is this city stirs to life and, for a brief moment, becomes something else entirely – tender, fleeting and awash with colour. The jacaranda trees are a reminder that nothing is permanent – the seasons, our skyline, or even the ground beneath our feet. Joburg is a city of quick deals, short leases and collapsing infrastructure, but it’s also a city of reinvention – and surprising resurrections. 

The idea for Jacaranda In Your Pocket began after a trip to Tokyo. There I watched what looked like the last cherry blossom of the season whirl down gently from a tree. It struck me that we didn’t have rituals like that in Joburg – moments where the city pauses to notice beauty. 

From the start of Johannesburg In Your Pocket in 2013, my mission was to reframe Joburg as a city worth visiting, a city worth seeing. Because to see a city as a visitor is to approach it with curiosity, and care.

When you frame a city for tourists, you make it better for locals, too. You plant pride. You make room for imagination. I’ve often thought about how national effort can transform perception. Just saying it often makes it so. 

Before the Beijing Olympics the Chinese government launched a campaign to teach people to smile, queue properly and even to stop spitting in public – a national lesson in hospitality. 

In Germany, the 2006 Fifa World Cup became known as the Sommermärchen – the “Summer Fairy Tale”. The country discovered, almost by surprise, that it could be joyful and open, and as if in endorsement, sunshine unusually poured down on packed public squares and fan zones for weeks. It was, as one writer said, “a rebranding of the German soul”.

We had a hint of that during World Cup 2010, so I decided we might as well try to carry the torch ourselves. In a city of abandoned rail carriages – the ones you pass each time you cross the Nelson Mandela Bridge – it feels good to be a little engine that could.

We often get mistaken for a government department, but we are just a small business determined to tell the story of a city that too often gets buried under its own bad headlines. The real story is so much bigger, and infinitely more interesting than revolving-door mayors and restructured tourism departments. Important matters, but they are not the full story. 

I’ve always loved travel. I grew up in Benoni, forever gazing at the shimmer of the big city just beyond reach. At 18, I moved to Joburg. Since then, I’ve seen it rise, falter, and rise again – a city of staggering creativity and stubborn resilience. As a journalist, I was trained to chase stories; as an urbanist, I became obsessed with how cities work, how they fail, and how they can be improved. 

Covid changed everything. Our print guide vanished almost overnight. What started as a retreat online became a kind of lifeline – a conversation with the city when it needed one most. We published chefs’ recipes when restaurants were shuttered, DJs’ playlists when dance floors were empty, and the city’s first hiking guide when nature became our escape. 

Then, what began as an annual photo competition became an event series, one that changes each year. Vexed by the idea that we were encouraging people to photograph the blooms when many did not feel safe to explore the streets, we created a series of photo walks in Joburg’s jacaranda neighbourhoods, and then a journey by Gautrain from Rosebank to Hatfield, looping two jacaranda cities together.

We’ve cycled with the Biking Banditz, and this year we teamed up with a running crew where 350 people joined us for a 5km route through Parkwood and Saxonwold on a perfect October evening. We commandeered the red bus for bloom-spotting rooftop tours and then we added a helicopter flip from Westcliff. 

From its very foundations, Johannesburg, like the best of all iconic cities worldwide, is, at heart, a migrant city and those same dynamics that give the city its unmistakable energy and creative force can also feel alienating and unwelcoming. Until of course both a local and an out-of-towner can find their soulful plug into its secrets, offerings and rhythms. 

Looking back, I see that what started as a campaign has been something more personal all along – a lifelong act of place-making: a way to inscribe myself into the sinews of this place. 

Next year? Who knows? Maybe a ride through the trees on a recyclers’ trolley? 

Laurice’s five things to see and do in Joburg

Take a trip: The Black Hole Symphony with Universe on Stage and the JPO is where immersive storytelling, science, visuals and music collide. These performances sell out fast.

Melville’s back! Visit Die Pienk Kerk and you’ll see why. 

Plant with purpose. Balance your jacaranda love by reading Andrew Hankey’s decade-long project, South African Indigenous Garden Plants. 

Spot the Art Deco gems. Celebrate 100 years of this timeless style. Joburg’s packed with overlooked architectural treasures. DM

To see this year’s entries for the #jacarandainyourpocket photo competition, type #jacarandainyourpocket2025 into Instagram.

Laurice Taitz-Buntman is the founder of Johannesburg In Your Pocket, a city guide and media platform dedicated to reframing Johannesburg through storytelling, travel and urban experience.