Lilacs and Roots

Sixty-six years ago, when I was one year old, my parents bought a small Marinette farmstead.  I have memories of a herd of dairy cows that continued to live in the wet pasture on the 40 for a while; they were really big and scared me.  On hot summer days, Dad would put me in the cow’s big oval water tank.  I was so small I had to hang on to the center reinforcement rod across the tank; I grasped it for dear life since I hated my feet touching the bottom of the tank, where tar patches over leaks felt icky.  The cows would gather around watching this strange creature in their water.  Dad kept them far enough away that I didn’t panic.

The previous farm owners, the Carlsons, had done some interesting tree grafting work.  There were so many apple varieties in the farm orchard; big Wolf Rivers, transparents for applesauce, little sugar apples and greenings, which were wonderful once they’d been nipped by frost.  I never knew the proper names of some of these apples; and I’ve never seen apples that looked like fruit from a couple of those trees ever since. Two big, mature and naturalized asparagus patches awaited our searches, one in the old orchard area that eventually died out when I was in high school. A younger, more vigorous patch in back of the chicken coop was still producing when I graduated from college.

There were big, constantly expanding thickets of lilacs; three big patches of the common purple heritage type and one showy, enormous white lilac. The tall white one was up against the chicken coop and is a prolific bloomer with unusually large flower clumps. It was so tall already back then, that the only way for my siblings and I to pick a white bouquet for mom when we were little was to climb up on the chicken coop roof.

Nearly all the old apple trees have now died, although a few have survived all these years. Since they were mature and producing in 1957, the old survivors are at least 80 and maybe more. The asparagus is gone, although some of the purple lilacs, descendants of the ones I grew up with, are still there.

Still glorious though, and strikingly big, the white lilac survives.  Maybe a bit diminished, but the tree-like trunks of some of the original bush are still living there. The chicken coop roof is no longer to be trusted, so picking flowers is a challenge now – a task for a ladder.

I dearly missed lilacs when we were in Oklahoma. Mike bought me a bush, but despite my efforts with the water hose, the heat and drought of the summers were just too much for it. When we returned to Wisconsin and decided to build on the land we live on, one of my first goals, once we had defined what would be lawn, was to get a lilac bush.

When I mentioned this to my mom, she suggested I dig up one of the sprouts surrounding the parent white lilac. The offspring shrub I transported home, maybe 18” high when I planted it here, thrives and grew almost a foot every year, while protected  from the deer with a cage.

This year, that little lilac is almost five feet tall, blooming, healthy and beautiful.  I feel joy when I look at it; have a picture of it as the screen saver on my phone; and can’t wait to show my mom photos on my next weekly visit.  The transplanted lilac, like its parent bush, is resilient and like me, it has put down roots here. 

Our parents; both my human parent and the lilac’s mother shrub,  maintain roots in rural Marinette.  Both of these seniors are to be admired, they are very hardy stock.

You can reach me for commentary, alternative viewpoints or ideas at this e-mail address:  JanieTMartin@gmail.com