Is there anything better than lilac season and the intoxicating scent that comes with it?
The blooms are so sweet but the season is all too fleeting. In the year we’ve been in this house, I’ve been lucky enough to catch two lilac seasons. The purple blooms add a pretty punch and they perfume the whole house.
Normally, I’m a certified black thumb, but I’m on a mission to turn that around. I may not have planted the lilac bushes here myself, but I’m doing everything I can to make sure they stay healthy and full. You reap what you sow, right?
Now that this year’s blooms have sadly faded, I did a major pruning this weekend. I learned a lot about what to look for, and set out to cut back and prune up. The biggest I learned is that lilacs get ready for the next year’s flowers immediately after the current year’s blooms have faded. So, grabbed Moxie as a sidekick and set to work cutting down all of the spent blooms.
The second step was to trim down any shoots that were growing tall but were only producing leaves and flowers at the very top. This can happen with older plants that haven’t been tended in a while, and I had quite a few older shoots that I had to hack away at with a saw.
All in all, I ended up cutting away quite a bit of growth that will hopefully lead to more blooms next year. That’s the bummer – I won’t know until next year’s lilac season to know for sure.
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