Lilacs

When I was growing up, we had a lilac hedge separating two of our yards, and I always loved the lilacs. Although I am sure there were several individual lilac plants involved, I always thought of them as being one thing.

As I remember it, they bloomed for quite a while during the summer, and the smell of lilacs is wonderful. Plus, they were very thick. As a young child, I would tunnel along the bottom of the lilacs. They provided protection for birds that would nest in them and, while dad would sometimes trim them, squaring them off at the top, some years they were allowed to grow higher.

I planted one lilac shortly after we moved here and added four more later. One of the newer ones didn't green up after a hard winter but the others are still alive and well, but they grow very slowly and mine only bloom for about a week.

I just bought a couple more that I am going to plant, although my posthole digger is not enough for me to dig a hole where I want them to be, so I am going to have to get out some bigger guns. I have a wrecking bar around here somewhere, I think, or I may have brought it up north. Maybe a pickaxe, but I'd have to buy one of those.

Our yard consists of coal ash and rocks once you get down beyond a few inches so, when planting something like a tree, I have to dig out a much larger hole than if I were planting it in normal soil, in order to provide room for the roots to expand, and I'm thinking that maybe I'd like to dig out an even larger area than I did with the other lilacs since that might have something to do with their unusually slow growth.

 

I love lilacs, too, @Ken Anderson , and my mother had a lilac hedge along the front fence. It was beautiful, and I loved the fragrance, and always looked forward to the lilacs blooming each year.
They actually do not bloom for a long time, at least those in Idaho didn't, not like the crepe myrtles we have here in Alabama, which blossom in many colors and last all summer long.
Some lilacs, I think mostly the old-fashioned kind, will spread from suckers that start at the base of the plant each year, and you can transplant those to get new lilac shrubs.

We have an area outside the back door where it used to be all graveled (probably part of the parking area at one time), and under the gravel is hard-packed clay. Digging there is impossible.
Last year, @Ina I. Wonder gave me several blackberry bushes, and we wanted to plant them along the fence where we can't dig.
Bobby made a planter container that had no bottom, we filled it with dirt and mulch, and planted the blackberries there.
They have spread, and are now on both sides of the fence, and doing great. We removed the planter from around the berries, and re-purposed it out at the mailbox, where it is now planted with flowers.

The lilacs that you want to plant might work with the same plan. It just needs to be a planter that you can remove once the lilacs gets established. Or not.
You could even just leave it there if you wanted.
Bobby made ours out of wood, and screwed together, so if it would not just lift off, he could unscrew the corners and disassemble it; but we didn't have to do that.

 

It's not packed dirt though, it's coal ash. Since the paper mill was in Millinocket before the town, the part of the town that I live in is built on coal ash from the mill operations. Some established trees are able to get their roots through it, while others root horizontally. Some of them, including a cherry tree that we had in our back yard, simply fall over once they get too large for their root system to sustain. In order for a tree or even shrub to do well, it is necessary to dig through a couple of feet of coal ash.

 

Since the lilac are only a shrub, and do not have all the deep roots of a tree, I think that if you put it in a planter, and maybe left it there permanently, then the roots would spread horizontally, as you mentioned, and maybe eventually some of them would get down through the coal ash.
I planted a small lilac here last fall when Lowe's had them on sale.
It made it fine through the winer, and is budding out with leaves this spring; so I think they might be fine in North Carolina, too, @Lara Moss .
We seldom see them here either; but I think maybe it is due to the popularity of the crepe myrtles, which (when they are kept as shrub/bushes) are very similar to lilacs. They come in so many colors and bloom for so long, where a lilac just blooms in the spring and then is gone until the next year.
Of course, nothing can compare with the wonderful fragrance of lilacs in bloom ! !

 

The problem with planters in Maine are that the ground freezes hard in a planter, so that the plant would be unlikely to survive a winter. If I placed the planter beneath the ground, that might work but then I would still need to dig the hole, which is where I am at anyhow. I don't know about people from other countries but when Swedes moved to the United States from Sweden, they brought a sprig of lilac with them to plant in their new home. Pretty much everywhere Swedes moved to would have at least one lilac bush growing in the yard. Or they arranged to have one sent to them, but to have one from their own former yard in Sweden was something special.

The Swedes who left Sweden loved Sweden, but they were no longer able to earn a living there, especially for farmers or loggers. As it was told to me, they could no longer sell their crops to the person willing to pay the highest price but had to sell as a price that was established by the government, and that didn't cover expenses, or leave them with any hope for the future. The government also told them what they could plant and what they could not plant, so it was like being an employee of the government, but one without a guaranteed salary. Large numbers of Swedes emigrated, largely settling areas in the northern United States that were sparsely populated, creating their own rural towns.

 

I've planted the two new lilacs, added some compost to all of them, and encircled them with mulch.

 

I have several lilacs now, but only one that has ever bloomed. The others are growing very slowly, but I have had only one that did not survive the winter.

 

The non-flowering plant in the foreground is supposed to be a lilac but it doesn't look one bit like a lilac to me, so I'm wondering if it was mislabeled at the nursery or if it's a variety of lilac that I am not familiar with. The leaves don't look at all like those of a lilac. It's never flowered but it's getting large enough that it might flower next year if it is a lilac.