A lilac appreciation post.

I think of lilacs as plants in sisterhood with old ladies. They belong to a certain age in which flowering plants could grow to their full sizes in open gardens, and reach a certain venerable character in their flowering for the fortieth or fiftieth year. They are also associated with a certain kind of perfume category, the soliflore perfumes, in which the perfumer tries to recreate the smell of a single flower: lilacs are humble plants, and their smell goes unnoticed if paired with other flowers, or so I read somewhere. There's a lilac-oriented perfume that some like very much, En Passant (Passing Through), but even this one is not a soliflore lilac perfume, and it's not made with lilac essential oil but with an artificial recreation of it.

So lilacs are, by all accounts, unfashionable and irrelevant. I like that.

They, unconcerned, continue to flower in hidden corners all around the world, and they have the same loyal admirers as always: the many little bees, who love them, and these small blue-black beetles and noisy wasps, and the wind, who likes to carry their perfume away. Maybe their perfume is made just for the wind, and not to be bottled or sold. Hilda Conkling, when she was ten years old and still wrote poetry, wrote once:

After lilacs come out,

the air loves to flow about them

the way water in wood-streams

flows and loves and wanders.

I think the wind has a sadness

lifting other leaves, other sprays —

I think the wind is a little selfish

about lilacs when they flower.

Close to my apartment building there is a park built next to a graveyard, where some lilac bushes flower every year. They still haven't flowered yet, but when they do, people from the government come and prune them back. I felt bad for them, so I took some cuttings and rooted them in water (I got about a 50% success rate) so I can try and plant them somewhere kinder, where they might perhaps grow to their full size. If you happen to have time, go and try to find lilacs somewhere, sometime.

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, 

lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, 

and thought of him I love.

This last poem is not by Hilda Conkling (who supposedly never wrote poetry again once she grew), it is a piece from a line of poems I found by Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. He wrote it after the death of Abraham Lincoln, but it wouldn't be wise to reduce a living, breathing poem to a piece of historical commentary.

Lilacs in flower.

A closer view of the blooms.