When The Lilacs Bloom

 Cindy and I both grew up in climates where lilacs thrive, she in northeast Indiana and I in Kansas and southern Oregon.  We both loved the scent of the flowers.  To both of us, nothing says "it's Spring now" like the intoxicating scent of a lilac bush in full bloom.  However, living in Southern California has its drawbacks, one of which is that lilacs generally do not do well in San Diego's micro climate; there simply are not enough chill hours for most varieties of lilacs to bloom.  

Whenever we traveled back to visit her family in Fort Wayne in the Springtime, we would seek out blooming lilac bushes to get a hit of that heady scent of lilac.  Sometimes, if we couldn't find anything we could get close enough to without climbing over somebody's fence, we would drive by with the windows rolled down to get a "drive by" sniffing of the lilac's scent.  See A Drive-by Smelling

Early last Spring, before everything shut down because of the pandemic, she found a variety of lilac called "Blue Skies", Syringa vulgaris 'Monore', at one of the local nurseries that promised to be able to flower in warmer climates.  She put it in a biggish pot out by the mini-greenhouse I had made for her and hand watered it.  When she began to get sick last summer, she was able to spend less and less time in the garden.  The lilac began to suffer, and by the time I noticed what was happening and began to hand water it again, many of the leaves had turned brown around the edges and had begun to fall off.  I was afraid it might not survive, but over the winter the plant began to show signs of budding again.  

After Cindy died, I asked a friend to help me get the lilac planted in the ground near the bird feeder, where there was an existing drip irrigation connection, after I had watered the ground thoroughly so that we could dig a deep enough hole in the hard, compacted and very rocky soil.  

And it did leaf out, although the leaves are still a bit scant.  This variety is supposed to grow quickly to be about 10 feet tall and six feet wide, so it has a bit of growing to do yet.  

And It Bloomed!

The lilac scent was not very strong this time, and there weren't many flowers this year, but the scent was definitely there.  

And, yes, I did put some of Cindy's ashes in with the plant, so I'm hoping she'll always have Lilacs in the Spring.

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.

Return of the Monarchs

We've had a few butterflies of various types visit our butterfly garden in the front yard since the two Monarch caterpillars hatched out in late January (See "Mr. Upside Down Finally Hatches" and "Houston, We Have Lift-Off"), but until yesterday, only one Monarch.

Butterfly Bush

Now we have a Monarch fluttering around the yard, to the consternation of our cat Bailey, who has temporarily given up her lizard watching duties to follow the flight of the Monarch around the yard.  It's a good thing she hasn't figured out how to open the front door.

The butterflies seem to like the Butterfly Bush (Buddleia ), as well as the Yarrow, the Asclepia and even the roses.  We know the Buddleia is considered a non-native invasive species, but then so is a lot of the other stuff we seem to have growing in the yard.  It's amazing how well some things do in poor soil with little or no water.

I've read that one of the nicknames for Buddleia is "summer lilac", a name that evokes the wonderful scent of heavily laden lilacs in the Spring, a pleasure we unfortunately have to forego in San Diego; the climate doesn't have enough "chill hours" for us to grow them here.   I told one friend recently that she should consider her lilacs to be the reward for the cold, rotten winter they've had in the Midwest.  Lilacs about the only thing that makes us regret living in such a temperate climate.  Lilac scented candles just aren't the same.

We're glad the butterflies, bees and hummingbirds like the Buddleia, anyway.