Gardening:
The perfumed beauties that will add a sweet spot to any plot
Lilacs are among those special plants that have the ability to evoke memories. One glimpse of a big bush laden with dense, conical flower heads against a foil of heart-shaped leaves, or the merest hint of their strong, sweet perfume, and I’m transported back to my childhood garden in rural Nottinghamshire.
It was in the early 1980s that my mum and dad planted five small specimens at the bottom of a large lawn.
Over time they formed large, spreading shrubs that must have been 12ft or so in height. During May and early June, they carried their white, pink and reddishpurple blooms high in the air.
As I write about these plants, I can picture myself as a youngster in the garden, eating picnics on the grass, feeding fish in the pond and chasing our family’s Shetland sheepdog around trees and island beds.
Alas, the lilacs were removed a few years ago when my folks decided to give the space a revamp.
But now is a good time to create some memories of your own by planting a container-grown lilac. Those in bud will flower in the next few weeks but those without will establish readily, putting on a great show next spring and for many years to come.
In fact, lilacs are so tough that they can live for more than 100 years.
This tribe of deciduous shrubs are native to a huge tract of land, from south-east Europe to East Asia, where they are found in woodland.
Their botanical name, syringa, comes from the Greek word syrinx, meaning hollow tube – in ancient Greece, pith was drilled out of their stems to make flutes and pan pipes.
The first wild species arrived in these parts during the 16th century but lilacs didn’t become popular until the late 1800s. Their change in fortune is due largely to French nurseryman Victor Lemoine, who introduced a raft of highly scented varieties of Syringa vulgaris, a species that comes from the Balkan peninsula. From 1878 until his death in 1911, Lemoine’s lilacs were much sought after across Europe.
As an acknowledgment of his breeding work, the Royal Horticultural Society awarded him its Veitch Memorial Medal in 1894 for making an outstanding contribution to horticulture. It was the first time it had been given to a foreign national.
His family-run nursery continued to create new lilacs until it closed in 1968. During its tenure, an estimated 214 different lilacs rolled off the production line, including such stalwarts as lilac blue ‘Firmament’, pink ‘Belle de Nancy’ and ‘Madame Lemoine’, which has double white flowers.
Sometimes called French lilacs, those bred at Lemoine’s nursery, along with the many other varieties of Syringa vulgaris, are not the only types available. In fact, there are close to 450 different ones, ranging in height from 3ft to 20ft and with a flowering period that doesn’t always stick rigidly to late spring and early summer.
The US’s Bloomerang series really earn their keep. Rather than delivering a single flush of flowers that lasts a few weeks, these flower profusely in spring, take a short rest, and then flower sporadically until autumn. A purple variety was the first on the scene in 2009, followed by pink and dark purple.
Lilacs like a sunny spot and prefer well-drained, neutral soil but are so easy-going that they’ll tolerate chalky or even slightly acidic conditions. Plant them as specimens in lawns or use to add structure to beds and borders. They also make a delightful flowering hedge if you set plants 20in apart in a row.
Another option is to grow compact lilacs in 18in-diameter pots, using a 50/50 mixture of peat-free multi-purpose compost and John Innes No3. Syringa meyeri and its progeny used to be the go-to types for containers, but the recently introduced Flowerfesta series are a better bet as they grow to only 3ft.
Once flowers start to fade, and you can clearly see two shoots start to swell on stems directly underneath, then dead-head. Lilacs look best as open, multi-stemmed shrubs with about ten stems. Remove one or two stems each winter to encourage plants to produce new ones from the base.