Where are my jacaranda flowers?

We have a beautiful jacaranda tree in our back yard, which flowers every October. Every springtime like clockwork, as a lovely birthday present to me (!), beautiful clusters of purple flowers appear all over the tree, and each day over the next few weeks are shed to form a gorgeous lilac carpet over our lawn.

This is not our tree - but you get the idea
Image by Thierry Caro, from Wikipedia,
copied under license Creative Commons

Except this year.

All through October, November and into December, we had no flowers!

THIS is our tree  :-(

Can I blame global warming? The end of the drought...? Are we in an El Nino year?  (On that - what happened to El Nino and La Nina? Not many years ago they were all the rage, an El Nino was identifiable and talked of every 3 to 4 years - now very seldom discussed. Have they really disappeared? Or do they not fit the climate change paradigm...?)

I tried Google and Ask.com. I googled "Jacaranda flowers" and asked Ask.com "why hasn't my jacaranda tree flowered?"  Unusually, both let me down - no info other than a summary of where Jacarandas come from (South America and the Carribean) and when they flower (spring).

I have heard since that there is a bit of a thing in Melbourne this year, where jacarandas have flowered later than usual, and no one knows why.

This week, we have got a few flowers - a very tiny number, but perhaps we'll see a full flowering soon. Fingers crossed.

Our tree with this year's first flowers - two months late!

What Jacaranda litter usually looks like
Image by Peter Greenwell, at Wikipedia,
copied under license Creative Commons

Our jacaranda litter -
not exactly the sea of purple we were expecting

ADDENDUM, 1 January. We got our flowers - in mid-December?! Tree looking more respectable now.