The Planting Of The Lilacs...

Spring was in the air today - and it's only March 7th! We can only hope this trend continues and spring will make it's arrival early.

This week we'll be talking about lilacs. We had a learning experience with lilacs last year when Bob and I decided to use lilacs as a privacy wall to the back yard. We found there were many different lilacs - both regular and hybrid - and that you could purchase lilacs in various sizes.

We ended up deciding on 3 Donald Wyman Lilacs as our privacy wall. We choose this particular lilac for a number of reasons - it's form (nicely rounded), it's size (8-10 feet tall and 4-10 feet wide) and most importantly - it blooms two weeks after most lilacs. This enabled us to lengthen our lilac blooms well into June.

As we intended our lilacs to be a privacy wall, we decided to purchase mature shrubs rather than buying an inexpensive smaller shrub and waiting five years for our privacy... We will warn you, however - this is not an inexpensive venture. It was, however, well worth the money.

We first decided on a reputable greenhouse in our area. Really, if you are going to spend the money on mature shrubs - get a guarantee on them! The greenhouse we chose guarantees their shrubs (provided they are zoned for our area) for up to 3 years. We then obtained a list of plants, trees and shrubs that they carry - or could order.

From the list we researched each of the lilacs our nursery carried or could obtain. We were looking at size, price, disease resistance, mold resistance (a problem here in Maine...) and how quickly each lilac grew.

Once we decided on the Donald Wyman Lilac we visited the nursery to place our order. Because we wanted five foot shrubs, they had to be special ordered. Our spring last year was very bad - rainy and cold. We waited impatiently and finally by late May, about a month after ordering, we received the call saying our lilacs had arrived.

Being impatient and so ready to get our long awaited plants into the ground, Bob decided he would pick them up so we could get them into the ground that weekend.

Bob's 1972 Chevy Pickup comes in handy for this type of thing - as well as hauling dirt and mulch and a number of other gardening related things.

We did not, however, realize how big the root balls of these 5' lilac shrubs were going to be. Poor Old Yellow had it's work cut out in more ways than one when it came to our lilac adventure.

As soon as Bob pulled into the driveway with our long awaited treasures it was immediately apparent that we should have paid for the delivery of our shrubs... Each shrub easily weighed over 200 pounds. That's each - something we didn't expect. Our advice - have them delivered and put in the exact spot you intent to plant them!

So you're probably wondering - how in the world did they get the lilacs off the truck. It wasn't easy - nor was it even safe - this we can tell you... Luckily we have a strong teenage boy who helped his dad drag the first shrub to the back of the truck. We then made the boy move to a safe area while dad dropped the shrub off the truck. You would have thought we had dropped a tree with the thud it made... One by one they came off the truck in the approximate spot we intended to plant them.

Now that we've seen the burlap root balls we've realized - we were going to need huge, huge holes. Of course, we picked probably the only hot, humid weekend we had last year to do this and lilacs need full sun... Once the holes were dug, we still had the chore of getting the very heavy shrubs into the holes. Again, Old Yellow Truck came to the rescue. We ended up dragging each shrub into it's hole with a tow rope.

This picture was taken about three weeks after the lilacs were planted. They bloomed magnificently. I wish I had taken a picture this fall showing their growth throughout the summer. I can no longer fit the riding mower between them - which I could here. The shrub to the right gave us a surprise this fall and opened a single lilac bloom!

In our previous post we mentioned the planning of a new hosta/perennial bed for this spring. As you can see, behind the lilacs is an open palate awaiting color and plants.