A Drive-By Smelling

Lilacs!

One of the drawbacks of living in the San Diego climate is that there just aren't enough "chill hours" to allow some plants to thrive here.

One of those plants is the Lilac.

Cindy and I both grew up in areas where the Lilac (Syringa) is the hallmark of Spring; it just doesn't seem like Spring without that wonderful, overwhelming, intoxicating Lilac scent.

The Ceanothus plant, often called the California Lilac, has clusters of dark purple flowers that resemble the blossoms of the lilac, but they are a different species and don't have that in-your-face scent that real lilacs do.

So when we were back in the Midwest last week, it was killing me to drive past a huge bank of lilacs in full bloom every day.  I would have stopped to smell them, but it was a busy road with no place to pull over and park.  The best I could do was to roll down the windows and stick my head out to catch some of that intoxicating scent as I drove past.

We started checking out neighborhoods that looked like they might have lilacs that we could jump out and smell, but we finally noticed that the next door neighbor had a dwarf lilac with blooms just opening, so we finally got our chance to smell some lilacs.

We'd love to have real Lilacs here, but after all, we do get orange blossoms.