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Heat triggers a hormone called florigen that makes the jacaranda trees flower, North explains.

That job also is performed by signaling proteins, florigen’s messengers so to speak.

Florigen travels from the leaves through the tree’s circulatory system to deliver the “go” signal to buds that have been waiting in the wings since last summer.

How florigen stimulates the process of making a flower is “still an active research field,” says Lawren Sack, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA.

This hybrid, the team found, produced greater yields because there was one normal copy and one mutated copy of a single gene that produces a protein called florigen.