Our lilac is flowering! This is cause for celebration in any spring, but it’s extra special this year because the plant was given to us by a friend over at Ravensbourne (thanks Kym). Her garden is warmer than ours, so the lilacs she had planted never bloomed very well. Rather than coddle them along she dug the mature shrubs out of the ground and gave them away. I love this aspect of gardening culture – the swapping of plants and hard won wisdom, so I was really keen to see the plant thrive.
For a year it piddled along and did next to nothing other than blow over in a storm. I re-staked it, mulched, gave it plenty of seaweed extract and a dressing of wood ash in the hope that it would get a liking for our conditions and send out lots of beautiful new roots. For months during summer and autumn our lilac looked horrible. It was alive, but had failed to leaf out and was a bunch of bare sticks in an otherwise lush garden. Now, after a cold winter, the lilac looks beautiful. It’s covered with big panicles of grape coloured flowers and the fragrance…wow. What a knockout.
I should have had more faith that the plant would do well. For those who aren’t aware, the lilac genus, Syringa, is most closely related to privet and that’s a plant in more than enough abundance around our parts. We have a large windbreak of the non-weedy small leaved variety on the western side of our house. It was planted thirty years ago by the property’s original owners and went absolutely ballistic during last summer’s big wet. Down at the creek, the large leafed privet is a serious weed. What’s more, lilacs are generally grafted onto a privet rootstock. Should I be surprised that our plant is thriving? Probably not.
When push comes to shove, lilacs are a tough and adaptable plant. Their ideal conditions are a slightly alkaline, relatively impoverished soil, plenty of sun in summer, and a cold winter to produce the best flower displays. I’m not sure if they’re growing lilacs down at Stanthorpe, but their conditions should be ideal. In the blacksoil parts of the Downs, it would pay to improve drainage with some gypsum and compost, while on the red soil plateaus an annual dressing of lime (or wood ash) each autumn.
Lilacs are best purchased bare-rooted in winter and for best results, a special technique should be used when planting. You see, lilacs are difficult plants to strike from cuttings. But they are easy to graft, so propagators put the named lilac variety onto either a seedling lilac or a privet rootstock. However, privet grafts usually fail in five to ten years and lilac seedlings tend to have inferior flowers. Both these problems can be overcome by planting your lilac extra deep, making sure the graft union is buried about 20cm below soil level. In time the named lilac will grow its own roots above the graft, and any suckers coming from below ground can simply be cut out. Note that this is the opposite of what you should do for most grafted trees, which need to be planted with the graft union above soil level.
As for pruning lilacs, there’s two golden rules: first, avoid pruning if you don’t need to; and second, if you must prune, do it just after the plant his finished flowering. Lilacs flower on wood formed the previous summer and autumn, so if you prune in April or July, you’ll be cutting off all the flower buds. Who wants a lilac that never flowers? Not me. Flowers are the lilac’s raison d’etre.
There are more than 2,000 named lilac cultivars, but the most commonly available in Australia are either hybrids or cultivated forms of Syringa vulgaris, the common lilac native to the Balkan Peninsula. The vulgaris types tend to have more fragrant flowers, so I’d be inclined to keep an eye out for ‘Belle de Nancy’ (compact, mauve flowers), ‘Congo’ (dark purple flowers), ‘Madame Lemoine’ (pure white, double flowers) and ‘Sensation’ (purple flowers with a white border). Specialist growers are also likely to have a range of species available, including Syringa afghanica, which has pastel blue flowers and lacy foliage.
I have absolutely no idea what variety the lilac in my garden is. And you know what? I don’t really care. I’m just happy that the plant survived the wettest summer in 40 years, and that it’s flowering. You’ll excuse me then, if I finish up for another week and race outside to take a whiff of that heady fragrance.
First published in the Toowoomba Chronicle 15th October 2011. Photo by Justin Russell
Don’t forget to check out our new site, The Radish, edible gardening from roots to fruits.
