Lilac

Where it grows

Wild Syringa vulgaris grows on rocky limestone hillsides of the Balkan Peninsula, particularly in Albania and Bulgaria. It was carried into western Europe through Ottoman Constantinople in the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth century it had reached Britain and become a fixture of cottage gardens; American settlers planted it everywhere they made farmsteads.

How to recognise it

A multi-stemmed deciduous shrub or small tree three to six metres tall, with heart-shaped opposite leaves and dense pyramidal panicles of small tubular four-lobed flowers ten to twenty centimetres long. The scent is sweet, slightly powdery, and unmistakable. Modern French hybrid lilacs include doubles and a range from white to deep magenta.

Garden & cultural uses

Lilac essence cannot be distilled successfully from the flower, so all “lilac” perfumes use synthetic accords combining terpineol, indole, and hydroxycitronellal. Hard pruning of old leggy lilacs in late winter rejuvenates them but sacrifices a year of flower. They naturalise around abandoned New England farmhouse foundations long after the buildings are gone.

In symbolism

In Russia the lilac is a flower of spring and renewal; Walt Whitman’s elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” elevated it into the central American symbol of mourning Lincoln.