1st May - The Time of Lilac

“When on a summer evening the resounding sky growls like a tawny lion, and everyone is complaining of the storm, it is along the ‘Meseglise way’ that my fancy strays alone in ecstasy, inhaling through the noise of falling rain, the odour of invisible and persistent lilac-trees.” Only Proust can describe the impossibly simple and yet complex Lilac. Again he writes “…we would leave the town by the road which ran along the white fence of M. Swann’s park. Before reaching it we would be met on our way by the scent of his lilac-trees, come out to welcome strangers. Out of the fresh little green hearts of their foliage the lilacs raised inquisitively over the fence of the park their plumes of white or purple blossom, which glowed even in the shade with the sunlight in which they had been bathed…” Long before Proust part of the myth of Lilac was its uncommon power to unlock memories. The smell defies description, and does not bear drawn out inhalation as it becomes cloying in the nose. The beauty of the flowers is easier to transpose to the page than the bottle. Edward Thomas’s ‘swollen turbans of jeweled pashas’, Proust’s ‘rosy minarets’ whose hue has the ‘pure and vivid colouring of a Persian miniature’- the images conjured are as often exotic in quality as homely. William Beckford planned his burial mount with a walled ditch about it, a pink Aberdeen granite Egyptian inspired tomb and a ‘grove of lilacs’ (sadly gone). Thus he combined all the Lilac’s charms with its mournful Lenten purple attributes. Corruption is never far from the lilac even at its height. Many discerning gardeners will not plant the white-flowered one, despising the way the dead brown buds muddy the snowy panicles. ‘ Lilac-time is nearly over; some of the trees still thrust aloft, in tall purple chandeliers, their tiny balls of blossom, but in many places among their foliage where, only a week before, they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, these were now spent and shriveled and discoloured, a hollow scum, dry and scentless’ remembers Proust. The scent is schizophrenic. To those that don’t love it passionately it is too much, assaults the senses and the sense. “Too sweet, troubling and molesting the head in a very strange way” wrote Gerard in the 17th century. It is not a scent in which to wallow, it does become rank in the nose. But in wafts it surpasses anything in the tropics, white lilac containing the extraordinary ‘well-being’ inducing compound now as ‘indol’. Vita Sackville West alludes to the same watery quality as Proust when she finds solace ‘in the distilled scent of every dew–drenched lilac you ever smelt’, a quality like that of drinking the absolute finest White Burgundy. Lilac somehow encompasses the louche and the homely. In the 19th and early 20th centuries the family Lemoine of Nancy, France, was gripped in a fever of breeding, creating from the humble but delicious common lilac and its cousins, shocking plumes of immense weight loaded with scent, their names redolent of a lost world, Necker, Lamartine, Vauban. They also extended the range of hue to depths of rich crushed mulberry and heights of iridescent stormy slatey-violet blues. 19th century Europe’s drawing rooms were entranced by the shrub and the ‘starry locks that crowned their fragrant heads’. Russians still stop trains to jump out and pick lilac from the trackside.

Friday, May 08, 2009