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The Purple Paradise, Pretoria in South Africa is popularly known as the Jacaranda City due to the thousands of Jacaranda trees planted in its streets, parks and gardens. This is the months of October and November, Pretoria is transformed into a glowing purple mass - around 40 000 and 70 000 Jacaranda trees in Pretoria are in bloom! Jacarandas line the streets and dot the parks and gardens throughout the city and purple carpet their floors with their bee-attracting blossoms. The greatest displays of nature's colors, thanks to the ubiquitous jacaranda tree, which lines street after street, showering its bright petals on sidewalks and roadways, bringing a lightness to every day. Jacaranda is a genus of 49 species of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to tropical and subtropical regions of Central America, South America, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and the Bahamas. In early 1888 in South Africa it was imported from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, two trees were planted in a Arcadia school. Their popularity as a street tree soon took off and they now line in many kilometers of streets throughout Pretoria. The jacaranda has been declared a Category Three invasive alien plant, which means, in terms of the Conservation of Agricultural Resources Act, as amended in March 2001 it can be kept only under certain strict conditions in South Africa. The plants are not allowed to occur anywhere except in biologically controlled reserves, unless they were already in existence when the regulation came into effect.This means that existing plants do not have to be removed by the land user. However, they must be kept under control and no new planting may be initiated and the plants may no longer be sold. The reason for this dispensation was that the trees were part of the character of the City and the City would thus lose something unique if they were all eradicated.