Lilacs: Beautiful varieties for home and garden

By Naomi Slade

A celebration of an iconic bloom, Lilacs offers advice on how to care for and propagate these exquisite flowers.

Naomi Slade explores a wide range of different lilac species and cultivars, all beautifully photographed by Georgianna Lane – showcasing not only Syringa's delightful shades of purple and mauve but also the whites, blues and yellows.

Announcing the changing of the seasons and the coming of summer, Lilacs are ubiquitous both within gardens and as a wild flower. Their scented flowers are well-known to many with whorls of fragrant blossom sitting perfectly at nose-height.

Symbolising first love, their fleeting bouquet can provoke a sense of nostalgia. As a garden flower they became a popular choice in the eighteenth century, particularly across North America, and lingering shrubs and blooms in the wild are a telltale indication of where earlier dwellings might have been.

Naomi Slade explores a wide range of different Lilacs, drawing our attention to the varying shades of pink, lavender, mauve, burgundy and of course, lilac, and also to white, blue and yellow varieties. Lilacs are durable plants and this book offers advice on how to care for and propagate your flowers, how to identify rare species and practical tips for how to get the most glorious blooms and the most bountiful cut flowers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: Oct 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9780008601652

Naomi Slade

Naomi Slade is a writer, designer and gardening expert. She works extensively within the garden media, contributing regularly to publications including the Telegraph, The English Garden and House and Garden; she has a column in Garden News magazine and has presented on BBC Gardeners’ World. Naomi’s other books in this series include Dahlias, Lilies, Lilacs and Hydrangeas, all of which were collaborations with Georgianna Lane

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Cover image: Lilacs: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden by Naomi Slade & Georgianna LaneNo image descriptionTitle page image: Lilacs: Beautiful Varieties for Home and Garden by Naomi Slade & Georgianna Lane, Pavilion logoNo image description

COPYRIGHT

Pavilion

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by Pavilion

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022

Text copyright © Naomi Slade 2022

Photography copyright © Georgianna Lane 2022

Illustrations by Somang Lee

Naomi Slade asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 9781911663966

eBook ISBN: 9780008601652

Version date: 2023-06-16

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

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Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9781911663966

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

INTRODUCTION

THE HISTORY AND BOTANY OF LILACS

Societies and organizations

FANTASTIC FRILLS

Katherine Havemeyer

Krasavitsa Moskvy: syn. Beauty of Moscow

Paul Thirion

Souvenir d’Alice Harding

Nadezhda: syn. Hope

Rustica

Madame Charles Souchet

Victor Lemoine

Michel Buchner

Émile Lemoine

Charles Joly

Souvenir de L. Thibault

Le Nôtre

Rosace

Comte de Kerchove

Général Pershing

COOL PERFECTION

President Lincoln

Lilac Sunday

Maréchal Foch

Henri Martin

Jeanne d’Arc

Arch McKean

Président Grévy

Edward J. Gardner

Pocahontas

Adelaide Dunbar

Prodige

Lavender Lady

Pasteur

DELICATE DELIGHTS

Esther Staley

Syringa × chinensis ‘Bicolor’

Prophecy

Syringa × laciniata

Angel White: syn. White Angel

Syringa josikaea

Miss Canada

Syringa × chinensis

Albert F. Holden

Syringa × persica

Mme Antoine Buchner

Josée

Mont Blanc

Syringa oblata

Agnes Smith

Syringa × chinensis ‘Saugeana’

Syringa pubescens subsp. microphylla: syn. S. microphylla

Maiden’s Blush

Congo

SUMPTUOUS SOPHISTICATION

Alice Christianson: syn. Alice Christensen, Alice Christenson

Etna

Président Poincaré

Belle de Nancy

Banquise

Mrs Edward Harding

Firmament

Mme F. Morel

Agincourt Beauty

Sensation

Primrose

Znamya Lenina: syn. Banner of Lenin

Edith Cavell

Monge

Mme Lemoine

GROWING AND CARE

Cultivation

Selecting varieties

Buying lilacs

Grafted lilacs

Planting and moving lilacs

Propagating lilacs

Pruning

Pests, diseases and other problems

Glossary

Index

Acknowledgements

Photographer’s Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

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INTRODUCTION

WHEN THE WARM SPRING DAYS ARRIVE AND THE LILACS BURST INTO BLOOM, ALL OF NATURE EXHALES. FOR THIS IS A PLANT THAT COMFORTS AND INSPIRES; IT FILLS THE AIR WITH NOSTALGIA, MARKING THE PASSING OF TIME AND THE CHANGING OF THE SEASONS AS SURELY AS THE CHIMES OF THE CHURCH BELLS. CLASSICALLY ELEGANT, UNIVERSALLY LOVED; CHEERFUL AND RELAXED; WHEN LILACS ARE IN FLOWER ALL IS AS IT SHOULD BE AND ALL IS WELL IN THE WORLD.

Lilacs in bloom are compelling and ephemeral; captivating in the present but, as a memory, enduring. A flower of then rather than a flower of now. In the mind’s eye it is imbued with ghostly beauty; the favourite tree with its enveloping fragrance; a cascade of brilliance and an armful of flowers gaily gathered.

It is an image that infuses daily life – the eponymous colour; the popular motif and a familiar flower that is synonymous with an idyll. Yet the season of the flower is short and fleeting, leaving us with an indescribable yearning for lilacs that is akin to hiraeth, the Welsh word for which there is no English translation but which represents a spiritual longing for a home that might never have been and a nostalgia for places to which we cannot return.

Even when half-forgotten or left behind, lilacs follow us faithfully. They may fall out of fashion, yet they grow on in parks and old gardens, spilling into the landscape and naturalizing themselves in hedgerows, biding their time and minding their own business.

Native to large swathes of Central and Eastern Europe and to Asia, lilacs are part of the olive family and are closely related to privet, Ligustrum, with which they share much of their range. In their homelands, it is likely that this pretty – if sometimes scruffy – wild plant has been enjoyed and grown by the local people, without fanfare or record-keeping, for hundreds or even thousands of years. Gradually it ascended to more eminent gardens, and finally to the Courts of Istanbul. Thus, when botanizing Ambassador Ogier Ghiselin, Count de Busbecq, returned to Austria in 1562, among his many treasures was a lilak, which he planted in his garden.

Legend has it that when Busbecq relocated to Paris some years later, he took a shoot with him. A humble sprout, perhaps, but the very scion that kick-started the French passion for lilacs. Whether there is a grain of truth in this or not, it was in nineteenth-century France that the lilac underwent its first transformation and luminaries such as the Lemoine family set their sights on creating more numerous and more perfect forms.

Their extensive breeding programmes at first focused on the available cultivars of Syringa vulgaris, and these were joined by other species as they were discovered and shipped west from Asia. But such was the extent of the Lemoines’ success, common old Syringa vulgaris is often known as French lilac to this day.

But the lilacs had not stood still. Though adored and feted in France, they moved onwards to neighbouring countries and out across the world, to the colonies and new lands of North America, Australia and New Zealand. Soon, they were embraced by other plant breeders. Collections were established; across Europe, in Russia and, particularly, in the USA, where the lilacs that had arrived with the original pioneers had flourished in both the gardens and in the hearts of a country that was styling itself as the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It is hard to pinpoint exactly what has secured the status of Syringa as an object of wonder and desire, but its unfussy ways and an appealing habit of erupting into short and glorious bloom, a bold contender for the main event of spring, must certainly have helped. And our pleasure in this has led to a plethora of ornamental and practical uses, such as arranging the flowers prettily on cakes, sprinkling them into the bath or in the creation of a range of mediaeval concoctions, designed to lower fever, aid digestion, improve the complexion or purge the body of worms.

In more recent history, lilacs became the darlings of popular culture, loved and lauded by songwriters and in poetry. In ‘The Barrel Organ’ by Alfred Noyes, one is exhorted to ‘Come down to Kew, Kew in lilac time/In lilac time, in lilac time/Come down to Kew in lilac time/(it isn’t far from London!)’. While, more mournfully, they appear in Walt Whitman’s epic and elegiac poem, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, written on the death of President Lincoln.

In 1919, the flower was adopted as the state flower of New Hampshire, due to its romantic strength of personality, and historian Leon Anderson writes that lilacs are ‘symbolic of that hardy character of the men and women of the Granite State.’ They hold similarly mighty sway in Russia, where they are the national flower and symbol of Russian victory in the Second World War.

In the meantime, lilacs have also crept inexorably into folklore, as perverse, contradictory and confusing as any plant can be. On the one hand, white lilac is a symbol of innocence and a celebration of new life and new love. On the other, a girl who wears a sprig of lilac will never get married, and anyone who received a bunch of lilacs from their betrothed could consider the impending nuptials cancelled. Like other white flowers, such as snowdrops and lilies, there is a superstition that bringing lilacs into the house spells ill fortune, while an association with funerals has arisen from the old custom of lining coffins with white lilac, the perfume masking, to a certain extent, the odours of putrefaction.

In Persian, the word lilak or lilaf, means ‘bluish’, and this, in various forms, is how lilacs are known across Europe. The botanical name, Syringa, however, comes from another story.

In Greek legend, Syrinx was a nymph and chaste follower of Artemis. Pursued by Pan, the amorous god of nature and wild places, she rushed to the river’s edge where the river nymphs took pity on her and turned her into a reed. Frustrated at his loss, the deity picked the reed and turned it into a pipe that played a whispering, echoing tune. In some versions she lives on in the music or is with him forever in the pipes, as he