Masters: Bragging about California's color is nothing new, and today we see it in the thousands of social media posts every spring, showcasing one of our most controversial trees--the jacaranda.

Brought here from South America and championed by Kate Sessions herself, the jacaranda adds undeniable beauty to our streets, but it's not without its detractors.

So, this is a real treat and a "Lost LA" first.

We have a bona fide bare knuckles debate about jacaranda trees.

Man: Jacarandas.

Masters: Jacarandas...L.A.

's most controversial tree.

I think we can probably all agree on that.

Woman: Definitely fair to say.

Masters: To hear both sides, I drove to an Insta-perfect street in Whittier, lined with blooming jacarandas, and met up with "L.A.

Times" journalist Gustavo Arellano and Julia Wick, who have very different takes on the tree.

Maybe somebody here would like to make an opening statement.

Arellano: Jacarandas suck.

Masters: Ha ha!

That's the opening statement.

How would you like to respond?

Wick: An elemental, beautiful piece of the Los Angeles landscape.

Also, beyond just how visually stunning they are, what other seasons do we have in L.A.?

We have fire season, pilot season, jacaranda season.

Arellano: We have tamales season.

We have Hollywood Bowl season.

We have Dodgers season.

Jacaranda trees.

Look at it.

Purple?

Yeah.

But look at the bark.

It's spindly, it's ugly.

The leaves look like ferns and ferns just suck as well.

Also, you obviously never lived under a jacaranda tree the way my family did.

Wick: I have 2 on my street, but yes, I very much avoid parking my car under it.

Arellano: Well, ours was right in front of our house.

We had to park there.

I had to clean everything up.

The smell of jacarandas-- I don't want to say it disgusts me, but it's absolutely terrible.

And also, more importantly, there's no use to jacarandas.

If you're gonna make an argument, use the cherry blossom argument.

Say jacaranda trees are ephemeral, just like I did.

Masters: They're ephemeral, and the point that you make in your article is that they remind us of the passage of time.

Wick: Yeah, it's the only passage of time we have here.

You blink, and you miss it.

They refuse to kind of be on any kind of clock.

Arellano: Yes, some trees bloom earlier than others.

So you have like a whole month and a half of jacarandas, which I call jacaranda hell.

Masters: I really don't want to take sides here, but... Wick: It does feel like you agree with me.

Arellano: Oh, geez... Masters: So, a big part of your critique against the jacarandas is that they're useless.

Arellano: They're the In-N-Out of trees.

Overrated.

Masters: In-N-Out.

Overrated.

Arellano: The best plants, there's a use for them.

You can make something out of palm fronds for Palm Sunday or get the dates.

Wick: What about beauty for beauty's sake?

Masters: Exactly.

What about arts?

Arellano: Libre arts, or whatever MGM said.

What's beautiful about them, though?

Purple.

Purple is a very beautiful color.

But get violets, get roses.

Roses are far more beautiful.

Bougainvillea.

We had a bougainvillea vine growing up right next to the jacaranda.

Lightning struck the jacaranda tree.

The bougainvillea still lives.

I write a lot of columns for the "Los Angeles Times," and I get a lot of hate and a lot of love.

This is one of the few columns, everyone hated me.

Everyone.

So few people actually agreed with me.

Wick: Well, I will say they've been polarizing pretty much forever.

One thing that was fun, I wrote the story about them years ago, where I went back through the archives and read basically every time the word jacaranda had ever come up in a Southern California paper.

And there was a great column from like the early 1960s about how people love or hate them.

And the main thing was because it can ruin your wall-to-wall carpeting when you track them in.

Masters: So you two really are here, standing here representing very old and competing traditions.

Wick: Yes.

Masters: OK.

Arellano: It's one of those questions that are quintessentially Southern California.

Wick: And I think there's something so kind of quintessentially L.A.

about a tree that is this beautiful but also this ephemeral, that it's such a short period of time where you actually get the beautiful thing-- Arellano: And so destructive, too.

Wick: And so destructive, too.

Exactly.

What could be more L.A.

?