Bewitched By Lilac: Magic Memories

First off and logically speaking, a lilac bush is incredibly cold hardy, long lived and floriferous. So it is almost like magic in gardening terms. It is lovely here pictured in the landscape with some excellent companion plants. But that's not the whole story.

Lilac smells good. Common lilac is so dependable about smelling so uncommonly good that it has burned itself into our collective memory.

Lilac may be considered an heirloom plant in contemporary gardening terms, but lilac isn't just some old thing from Grandma's garden. Consider this. The Sleeping Beauty ballet hinges on the good Lilac Fairy's magic spell. The Greek god Pan used lilac for his flutes. Linnaeus collected lilac specimens and the Linnean Herbarium in Sweden still has them!

To this day we celebrate the lilac season with festivals like the upcoming Biggest Lilac Festival in North America, honor lilac bloom through literary (lilacs of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln fame) and artistic tradition (how about Manet's Lilacs and White Rose in a Vase) and highlight the thing in the media as a fine albeit living antique.

Lilac must cast some fine spell! I quietly suspect lilac is overrated in some respects. Just look at this home style photo (scroll down a notch) of Lilacs at Memorial Day in Vermont. This is an informal shrub at best. The shrub is ungainly and the blooms are fleeting, so most of the year it is just a nondescript bush. Sometimes powdery mildew attacks so the whole shrubby mess stands out and looks even worse than usual. Proper lilac culture and care include a serious annual pruning or if that's been neglected, the drastic measures approach, so lilac does not count as a care-free plant. To top it off, catbirds and mockingbirds love to nest in a lilac and then dive bomb the hard-working gardener...

So how many lilacs do I have? Well, this time we only "inherited" about five when we bought the house and to be truthful I did add ... well, one two skip a few oh maybe five or six!