Week 21: Common Lilac, Amy Lowell, Ronald Firbank

Cover Image. “Wills’s Cigarettes, Lilac” (1850), cigarette card from The George Arents Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

First quarter moon; 29 days to summer solstice (northern hemisphere).

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Headnote

The lilac—so pure, so sweet, so artificial. Although only 20 to 25 species of lilacs exist in the wild, more than 2,000 named cultivars (according to the official International Lilac Registrar) have been developed, most over the past 150 years. Beginning in the 1870s, French botanists Victor and Marie Louise Lemoine began using needles, tweezers, and paintbrushes to delicately cross the common lilac—native to the Balkan Peninsula but common throughout Europe—with species from China and other regions, creating spectacular double-flowered and early-blooming hybrids. Other breeders around the world followed suit, leading to an explosion of new varieties, actual plants, and public interest. The numerous cultivars now require a color code for reference and classification: I (White), II (Violet), III (Blue), IV (Lilac), V (Pink), VI (Magenta), and VII (Purple)—with some European organizations also recognizing VIII (Creamy Yellow.)

The flowers are just as abundant in literary and musical texts, featuring prominently in poems by Walt Whitman, Amy Lowell (see below), and even Hannah Arendt; short stories by the wonderful Kate Chopin and the lesser-known Aleksandr Kuprin; prose by Henry David Thoreau and Marcel Proust; and, of course, in various renditions of the sultry, melancholic ballad, “Lilac Wine.” If mosses are divine, then lilacs are carnal.

The common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) is a flowering deciduous shrub in the olive family (Oleaceae). This family, which includes approximately 28 genera and 700 species, such as olive, ash, jasmine, and forsythia, is grouped in the order of mints (Lamiales, not to be confused with the specific mint family, Lamiaceae). And this order is characterized by several features: (1) paired rotating leaves—or “opposite decussate phyllotaxis,” in botanical terms; (2) bilateral, two-lipped flowers that are fused into a tube; (3) reduced reproductive organs, including two or four stamens; and (4) strong scent oils concentrated in microscopic glandular hairs, or trichomes, that blanket the leaves and stems. Of course, lilacs differ from this final trait in concentrating their volatile scent oils exclusively within their flowers, replacing the general defense mechanism of the mints with a targeted, highly volatile aromatic lure for spring pollinators—“sweet and heady,” indeed.

Fig. 2. “Lilas,” from Répertoire de couleurs pour aider à la détermination des couleurs des fleurs, des feuillages et des fruits, by La Société Française des Chrysanthémistes and René Oberthür, et al. (La Société Nationale d’Horticulture de France, n.d.), p. 176.

Readings

1. Lilacs,

   False blue,

   White,

   Purple,

   Color of lilac.

   Heart-leaves of lilac all over New England,

   Roots of lilac under all the soil of New England,

   Lilac in me because I am New England,

   Because my roots are in it,

   Because my leaves are of it,

   Because my flowers are for it,

   Because it is my country

   And I speak to it of itself

   And sing of it with my own voice

   Since certainly it is mine.

Amy Lowell, “Lilacs” (The New York Evening Post, 1920), rpt. What’s O’Clock (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1925), pp. 68-74.

2. In May when the lilac is in flower, admiration is expressed for it on every side; even the most indifferent observer cannot restrain himself from manifesting his appreciation of the flower, praising its beauty and expressing a wish that it might be employed more frequently than it is in garden work. The gardener realizes that in this shrub we have particularly valuable material for gardens and parks, and recently unusual interest has been taken in it. Great collections, embracing hundreds of varieties, have been planted at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston, and at Highland Park in Rochester. This year at Highland Park, when the lilacs were at their best, they were inspected by over 30,000 visitors in one day, who had only words of appreciation and admiration for them.

William C. Barry, The Lilac (Rochester, NY: Mount Hope Nurseries), p. [2]. Rpt. from Horticulture (Oct. 9, 1909).

3. Offering a light, lilac wine, sweet and heady, Miami circled, here and there. She had a cincture of white rose-oleanders, and a bandeau of blue convolvoli. She held a fan.
   
   “Or do you care for anyt’ing else?” she was enquiring, automatically, of Mr. Musket (the Father of three very common girls), as a melodious tinkle of strings announced the advent of the minstrels from Broken Hill.
   
   Following the exodus roadward, it was agreeable to reach the outer air.
   
   Under the high trees by the yard-door gate, the array of vehicles and browsing quadrupeds was almost as numerous as upon a Market day. Coming and going between the little Café of the “Forty Parrots” (with its Bar, spelled Biar in twinkling lights), the quiet village road was agog, with bustling folk, as perhaps never before. All iris in the dusk, a few loosely-loinclothed young men, had commenced dancing aloofly among themselves, bringing down some light (if bitter) banter from the belles.
   
   Pirouetting with these, Miami recognized the twinkling feet of her brother Charlie, a lad who preferred roaming the wide savannah country after butterflies with his net, to the ever-increasing etiquette of his home.

Ronald Firbank, Sorrow in Sunlight (London: Brentano’s Ltd., 1924), pp. 27-28.

Supplementum

• Sinead Campbell, “Life of a Song: Lilac Wine — Nina Simone put her stamp on an intoxicating ballad,” Financial Times (July 14, 2024).

• David Doochin, “The Unknown French Horticulturist Who Made Lilacs Happen,” Atlas Obscura (June 28 2016).

• Kai Potter, “Lilacs Tell a Story,” The Provincetown Independent (June 16, 2021).

• John C. Wister, Lilac Culture (New York: Orange Judd Publishing Company, 1936).

• Growing Lilacs, Home and Garden Bulletin No. 19 (Washington, DC: Agricultural Research Service, 1973).

Fig. 3. “Flower fancies: calendar with text; depicting lilacs” (1865), from The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.