Burnsville – Valerie's Voice

A Bouquet of Lilacs, a Hard Way

I love the smell of lilacs…and the pretty delicate, purple flower blossoms are beautiful. They are a wonderful sign of spring. It’s always nice to bring a bouquet into the house.

This photo of our lilac bush was taken in 2020. It produced a lot of blooms that year.

The lilac bush we have in our backyard is an old-fashioned garden variety. The mother plant was planted in the yard of the house I grew up in, in NE Minneapolis when I was a little girl. In 1980, we moved to Burnsville and I dug up part of that bush from McKinley Street and transplanted it to our yard in Burnsville. Then, in 1994, when we moved to Northfield, I took along part of the lilac bush and planted it in the backyard of our new home.

Gary working on the lilac bush in our back yard.

The bush is old.

The past few years it has produced fewer and fewer flowers, and this year not many at all. We learned it is not blooming because it has a lot of old and dead wood, since it hasn’t been pruned. The only pruning it has received the last 29 years is when I cut off branches to bring in a sweet-smelling bouquets into the house.

Apparently, we should have been pruning the bush every year. Whoops.

So we decided to prune it way back this year. When we cut off the top branches, I cut off the smaller branches with blossoms.

A small bouquet of lilacs from the very top branches of our lilac bush.

That was a hard way to get a small bouquet!

We cut out a lot of dead wood and larger, old branches and trimmed back some of the new growth. We pruned a lot off.

It will take a couple of truck loads to get all the wood and branches from the lilac bush to the city compost site.

It was a good job that needed to be done. It looks pretty good…and hopefully the next year or two it will produce a lot more flowers once again.

A New Deck

Twenty-seven years ago, in 1995, one year after we moved into our house in Northfield, we added a cedar deck in the back. Gary took good care of it over the years, but it finally started to deteriorate.

We decided to replace the deck, and we decided to use composite material that does not need to be stained every other year. It should hold up well – perhaps for the next 27 years…

The deck will be a bit different. We had flower boxes built into our old deck, which I loved. Our contractor said he had not seen that design before…well, that’s because we designed it, and the carpenter, who build our deck back in 1995, built it how we designed it.

In summer I planted petunias in the flower boxes.

In winter I added evergreen boughs and lights in the flower boxes.

At our home in Burnsville, we also had flower boxes on the deck…so I’ve had flower boxes since 1980. I think I’ll miss them.

We kept the pergola Gary and our son built years ago.

We enjoy our deck, and use it a lot. We have shade trees that help keep it shaded for much of the day…however, there are a few hours in mid-afternoon when there is full sun.

We like the way the deck turned out… and the openness it offers that we didn’t have before.

Lilacs

The fragrant smell of lilacs is a delight this time of year. I wish it could last a little longer.

There is such a brief time to enjoy the beauty of the lilac’s purple blossoms, and have their sweet scent fill the air.

I have two lilac bushes. One is a Miss Kim, a fragrant, smaller bush that is more tame and works well for the spot I tucked it into – just outside the side window off the kitchen. It is a late bloomer.

The other bush is the “old-fashioned” lilac bush that grows huge and spreads and is wildly wonderful. It is in our back yard and is blooming right now.

I have cut branches of lilacs off this bush to bring its loveliness indoors.

This wild and wonderful bush is offshoot of the lilac bush that grew in my parent’s yard at the house I grew up in. Years ago, when Gary and I moved back to Minnesota, after a short stint in Ohio, my mom was still living in that house. I thought it would be fun to dig a sucker from the lilac bush and plant it in the yard of the house we bought in Burnsville when we moved back. It took off and grew into a wild and wonderful bush.

Fourteen years later when we moved from that house in Burnsville to our new home Northfield, I dug up a sucker from that lilac bush to plant in our new yard. It, too, grew into a wild and wonderful bush, and is still growing. We’ve been here 25 years.

So when I place my purple, aromatic lilacs in vases and put it them around the house it not only brings beauty and fragrance into the house, but also brings back some special memories.

Bringing lilacs indoors…in the entryway.

On a different note: below is a photo of our crabapple tree in bloom right now, in our front yard.

Another Indoor Plant Story

Once upon a time there was a young man and a young woman who met and fell in love. A few months after they met the young man was transferred out of state with his job. He offered his dieffenbachia plant to the young maiden, which she kept, and it continued to grow.

The tall plant on the left – the dieffenbachia plant – is over 40 years old (1976).

Their long distance relationship continued to grow and they got married. But his job took both of them to another state so she left the dieffenbachia behind with her mother to care for it. Her mother was very good with houseplants. And it continued to grow. It eventually reached the ceiling, so her mother cut a branch and rooted it and it started to grow again.

Two years later the couple moved back to Minnesota and once again took the dieffenbachia back into their care. It continued to grow and when it reached a certain height they cut it back and it continued to grow. The young family grew too…the couple raised two sons and lived in Burnsville for fourteen years. The dieffenbachia grew right along with the family.

Then the family moved to Northfield and they took the plant with them…and it continued to grow. After many years the middle-aged woman decided she didn’t have room for the plant any longer, so she brought it to her church and placed it in the fellowship hall between two large windows. Some mystery person watered it and tended to it and it continued to grow.

And someone has watered the dieffenbachia and cared for it for many, many years now and it continues to grow (the couple has attended this church in Northfield for 25 years, the plant has been in the church about 10 years, or more). The plant has been moved to various spots around the church building but it continues to grow.

Nobody at church knows the story behind this beautiful, faithful, dieffenbachia plant that continues to grow and bloom where it is planted… a lesson for us all.

Amen.