Lovely lilacs
Their heady perfume is the sweetest scent of spring
The Rochester Lilac Festival can trace its roots back to 1898 when a crowd of more than 3,000 people congregated in Highland Park to celebrate a spectacular showing of white, pink, mauve and purple lilacs.
Today, it’s the largest of its kind in North America, drawing more than 500,000 people annually to the 10-day free event that includes concerts, food trucks, arts and crafts, rides and more. (Visit www.highlandparkconservancy.org/lilacs for details.)
Not only does the park feature a hillside planted with 1,200 fragrant lilacs, it also includes flowering magnolias, cherries, crabapples, rhododendrons, and an arboretum populated with majestic trees.
The lilac festival has been on my bucket list for more years than I would care to admit, and this year we finally made the trek to Rochester — and the timing couldn’t have been better. A cool spring meant that the lilacs were just coming into their own last weekend — and while this year’s festival is over, the lilacs will continue to flower for some time to come.
Highland Park, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was the brainchild of George Ellwanger and Patrick Barry, owners of the world-famous Mt. Hope Nursery; the pair endowed the community with eight hectares of their nursery’s land and enlisted the help of noted landscape engineer Frederick Law Olmsted to develop the park.
Today, Highland Park covers 60 hectares of rolling hills filled with magnificent trees, pretty gardens and the largest collection of lilacs in the United States.
While the festival’s concerts and food trucks have their own appeal, I really enjoyed losing myself among hundreds of lilac bushes, taking in their delicate, pastel colours and heady perfume. Sunny skies, birdsong and the folky sound of banjo playing in the distance added to the charm.
Old-fashioned lilacs once graced the gardens of many southern Ontario homes — they were sturdy, reliable, self-sufficient and relatively easy to propagate. Old-time lilacs sucker (create many little branches at the base); these can be severed and planted as new plants. In days gone by, new brides would carry lilac, peony and daylily divisions from their parents’ gardens to their new homes, as reminders of the homes they left.
Modern gardeners looking for self-sufficient plants should not dismiss lilacs as old fashioned. Aside from their interesting form and beautiful flowers, they are long lived, drought tolerant, disease- and deer resistant, and attractive to pollinators — that sounds like an ideal shrub for a modern, self-sufficient garden.
After choosing a lilac, offer it a spot with at least six hours of sun each day, along with a well-drained, alkaline soil. Give the plant plenty of room to grow.
Dig a hole about as deep as the pot and then loosen the soil at the bottom of the hole; mix a little compost in with the soil. Take the lilac out of the pot and gently tease the roots apart. Position the lilac and then back-fill the hole with the soil you removed from it. Top-dress with additional compost and then water thoroughly. Keep the plant watered until it settles in. Most lilacs are drought-resistant; they will need minimal watering once established. Young lilacs can take up to three years to reach maturity and bear a good crop of flowers, so be patient. Top-dress the plant with well-rotted manure or compost each spring.
If required, lilacs should be pruned right after they flower; never prune lilacs in the early spring or fall. Why? Lilacs develop flower buds in the summer for the following year’s bloom. If you prune lilacs before they flower in the spring, you will remove the flower buds. If you prune them in autumn, you will also cut away next year’s buds.
After the lilac finishes blooming, deadhead the plant by removing the seedpods that form after the flowers fade. Do this job before the July 1 weekend. Dead, damaged or diseased branches can be removed as required. Suckers (shoots that emerge from the base of the plant) should be thinned or removed to maintain the plant’s shape.
After a few years of growth, your lilac will benefit from a good trim. After it has finished flowering in the spring, cut back one or two of the older, rough looking limbs to the ground — use large loppers or a hacksaw. Removing the older canes will keep your shrub healthy looking and encourage vigorous blooming on young canes.
An overgrown, neglected lilac can be rejuvenated by systematically removing one third of the older
branches over a series of three years. Start by pruning out one third of the oldest, least productive branches, cutting them back to the ground. Follow the same process in the second and third years to complete the renewal.
Lilacs can be divided. Take a shovel and cut a shoot from a mature plant in the spring, but wait until the fall before lifting it out. This encourages the division to develop a few roots so that it will be ready to live on its own.