What could be lovelier than waking on a sunny May morning to the fresh fragrance of a dewy lilac just outside your window?
The charm and sweetness of its multiple blooms and its ability to withstand severe cold and neglect are reasons for the lilac’s popularity in this and most other countries.
Hardy Lilacs
As to hardiness, lilacs really have it. Most of them will grow as far north as you can go in this country.
In fact, cold winters and long cool spring seasons seem to favor lilacs.
The warm winters and the overnight springs occurring in the South defeat the lilac—robbing it of dormancy and preventing its bloom.
As a rule, lilacs do not do well farther south than Columbia, Atlanta, Birmingham, Shreveport, or Dallas.
Toward the West, some gardeners in warm climates give their lilacs a period of semi-dormancy by keeping them on the dry side during fall and winter.
They are then watered copiously immediately before and during the flowering season.
Uses Of Lilacs In Your Home Landscaping Schemes
In your home landscaping schemes, lilacs can have a prominent place.
Although they become large, usually 8′ feet high or more, they are never ranked if properly pruned. So they go well at a house corner or beside a gate.
Use them in tall unclipped hedges or screens (you lose some of the bloom).
You may also set them as specimens close to your house, where you can smell the priceless fragrance and admire the flowers.
Use them as backgrounds for your flower borders and informally mix them with other shrubs.
Lilac Hybrid Varieties
Of the French hybrid varieties (incidentally, a misnomer since they didn’t all come from France), here is a collection of different colors and flower forms:
- ‘Vestale‘ (single’ white)
- ‘Paul Thirion‘ (magenta double)
- ‘Marechal Foch‘ (rose, single, early)
- ‘Edith Cavell‘ (double cream-white)
- ‘Firmament‘ (blue single)
- ‘Ludwig Spaeth‘ (single purple)
- ‘Henri Martin‘ (lilac double)
- ‘Mme Antoine Buchner‘ (lilac-pink double)
New Lilacs Extend Flowering Season
All of the 200 or more forms of lilac (common name for the genus Syringa) are large and free flowering.
Flower colors go from pure white through a medley of “blues,” lavenders, mauves to deep crimson.
Always the blooms appear in large panicles near the tips of branches.
Lilac time comes in mid-spring to early summer, but there are some excellent Asiatic kinds now that extend that season considerably past the time of the common lilac and the French hybrids.
Some of the greatest excitement among lilacs now is with the little-known species.
Here you find a wide variety of plant sizes, forms, and flowering seasons.
The Japanese tree lilac (Syringa amurensis japonica) makes a 20-foot tree with a short trunk and upright branches that form a rounded top.
It blooms in June with creamy clusters that are pleasantly fragrant.
So hardy, it is recommended in the harsh climates of the Great Plains. It’s well in scale with today’s ranch-type architecture.
A Low-Growing Lilac
For something low-growing in lilacs, try Syringa palibiniana. Its 3-foot bushes are covered with small, clean foliage.
The panicles of lavender or lilac blooms are about 6″ inches long, and they come in June.
This species of lilac is excellent where you need something low, such as under a window.
New hybrids from Canada extend the blooming season too. They make 8-foot shrubs with distinctly different lilac blooms.
Variety `Romeo’ is a blushing pink color, while `Royalty’ is clear, vibrant purple.
Plant lilacs in spring or fall, spring preferred.
Set them 2″ inches deeper than they stood in the nursery.
This is so they will form roots above the graft and be long-lived.
They do not usually flower until they mature, so you will wait a few years before seeing them bloom.
The wait is well worthwhile.
How To Take Care Of Lilacs?
Caring for lilacs is a various thing.
In New England, they flourish in abandoned farmyards that have gone unattended for decades.
Yet the simplest attention to them rewards you with more handsome foliage and better blooms.
To keep the plants young and vigorous, prune them every few years to cut out the oldest, woodiest branches at the base. They eventually would break out anyway.
New shoots will replace them. Around the base, you will probably find suckers coming up.
You can leave a few of these for future stems, but slice most of them off below the ground with a sharp spade.
Give lilacs protection against a few serious enemies, mainly scale insects and borers.
The most typical scale is an oyster shell, which looks just as the name describes it. Euonymus scale is another frequent kind.
Give a dormant spray (before leaves open) with lime sulfur to get them both.
Later, when scales are crawling, you can get them with malathion.
Borers, another serious enemy, will yield to malathion painted on the stems or squirted in the borer holes.
You can detect these vandals by looking for telltale sawdust below the drill holes and by foliage that suddenly wilts in affected stems.