Lilacs

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.

We’re just past the blooming season of lilacs. Below are three haikus about the delightful spring flower.

A lilac bouquet
on a dining room table
brings nature inside.  (by Sheri Eichhorn)

A transport in time
The fragrance of a lilac
Where does it take you? (by Valerie)

Lilacs in new bloom
Are the most beautiful smell
Nature offers us. (by Sheri Eichhorn)

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.