When we moved here, nine years ago, there was an established miniature lilac tree in the garden. I call it miniature because it wasn’t a full sized large lilac tree but was about six foot tall, fully grown, with small delicate lilac flowers rather than the large flowers on the very tall trees.
We were quite pleased that it was already in this garden as we had bought one for our previous garden which we left behind.
Last year the lilac tree suddenly died and we noticed another tall plant had been growing in it’s place but had been hidden by the original lilac. It had already got quite big so we took out the dead lilac and left the new plant. We thought it fortunate that it had taken the original lilac’s place and would mean we didn’t have to buy a large plant, which would be costly, to fill the gap.
The new plant didn’t flower last year and we weren’t sure if it was a different sort of lilac. This year the new plant is already as large as the original plant and has been in bud for ages.
I have been taking photos while waiting for the flowers to open. It has a lot more foliage than either the original lilac or a standard lilac tree but the flowers appear to be lilac flowers.
I have a theory that maybe like roses grafted on to wild roses to produce bigger flowers that this may be some sort of grafted lilac that has reverted to a more wild version and therefore has more foliage and less flowers.
Whatever it is we are quite happy to have the new plant in place of the old one.
Lilac in bud
The flowers are almost open
It’s now about six feet tall
Lilac flowers
Close up of fully opened flowers
It has taken weeks for the flowers to open, while the flowers have been open on the regular large lilac trees for some time. I definitely think it is part of the lilac family though.
I am amazed that such a big shrub/tree has appeared only last year and grown this much already. If anyone knows anything about this tree I would love to hear about it.
It is such a surprise when something just appears in the garden but I think there must be a connection with the plant that died. We are happy to have this replacement in our garden whatever it is.
Click here to see the history of my flock.
We had the same thing happen , When we moved here the Lilac tree
was lovely ,Then came some awfull winds , and the lilac tree got blown down,
we thought that was the end of that, Rubena said we had one that happened to
and it came back, And after a while ours came back, now it is really lovely.Full of flowers.
That’s interesting. The roots must have still been alive. The odd thing with ours is that it isn’t the same lilac that was there before. The one that was there was smaller with much smaller and less foliage and finer flowers. This one is much faster growing and has bigger leaves. It must be something to do with the lilac that was there though.
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