From Brazil

Jacarandas are flowering wonderfully in Brisbane right now. I photographed this street tree close to our new home. It appears that the English botanist Alan Cunningham sent jacaranda specimens from Brazil to the UK around 1818 and Australia got its first jacarandas in the 1850s. 

I've often admired the painting Under the Jacarandas by R. Godfrey Rivers, painted in 1903 and hanging in the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane - see extra for an image sourced online. 

There is more information here.