Take time to smell and revel in lilacs

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This article was published 24/05/2024 (849 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg really is at its best during lilac season.

For two weeks — and two weeks only — this city’s lawns and back lanes and sidestreets are transformed by those showy, conical blooms, ranging from inky plum to the palest lavender, filling the air with their gorgeous scent.

There’s nothing better than a lilac-perfumed breeze on a golden-hour-dappled evening in May. It’s the annual reward we wait all winter for.

And then, they’re gone.

This is a feeling, not a fact, but it does feel as though Winnipeg has an uncommonly high number of lilac bushes, doesn’t it? Every other house has one, it seems, which is why the smell of them simultaneously reminds us of all of our Winnipeg childhoods, no matter what era you grew up in. They thrive here, somehow, in our harsh climate, emerging every year to remind us that everything is temporary. Even winter.

Lilacs are not a native species. A member of the olive family, lilacs made their way from the Balkans to western Europe to North America, where they are visible vestiges of colonization, originally planted by settlers to make homesteads into homes.

The allure of the lilac is easy to understand: they are both intoxicating and elusive. Their lives are short. You can try to put them in vases, but they turn brown. Their scent can’t really be captured, either. I’ve yet to find a candle or a perfume or an essential oil that has even come close to how they smell on the tree.

Syringa, the lilac’s genus name, comes from the ancient Greek syrinx, meaning “pipe” or “tube,” owing to its hollow branches. In Greek mythology, Syrinx was the name of a beautiful wood nymph who was similarly intoxicating and elusive — at least to Pan, god of the wild, who was warm for her form, if you catch my drift.

To escape Pan and his constant advances, she transformed into hollow reeds that made a beautiful, mournful song whenever the wind blew (or whenever Pan sighed, depending on the version). Pan cut down some of those reeds to make his iconic panpipes — or syrinx — so she’d be with him, in some form, always. (You can almost hear Syrinx’s wistful cry: “Ugh, men.”)

In some retellings, Syrinx is called Syringa, and transforms herself into a lilac bush — a better symbol, perhaps, for Pan’s yearning for Syrinx, and Syrinx’s yearning to be left alone. After all, with its heart-shaped leaves and fragrant blooms, the lilac has often been a muse for art about longing.

Lilacs inspired Walt Whitman’s 1865 poem When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, an elegy for the then-recently assassinated U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, and a great many poems after that — plaintive poems about summers and childhoods and other things as fleeting as the blooms themselves.

Luckily for us, lilacs are perennials. No matter how much our lives change since “lilacs last in our backyards bloomed,” to borrow from Whitman, we can trust that every May, they will fill the air with a scent that can take us back, however briefly, to whenever we’re longing for.

Just make sure you take a moment to stop and smell them before they’re gone again.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com