Blooming Back at You. Bloomerang Lilac

My mom with her mother's day lilacs.

I wrote this article for the Gardener News last Spring. I then gave my mom a copy of this article with a large bunch of lilacs for Mother's day.

As a kid growing up, my mother’s favorite flower was a lilac.  Every mother’s day I would walk to the back of our nursery and find the big lilacs that we had growing. I would cut five or six flowers and make a giant bouquet for her. I probably was making my dad look bad, but it was mom’s special day, not my dad’s. Mom raved about the lilacs and the cut bouquet was given a prominent location in the center of our kitchen table.  I continued with these bouquets for many years. The lilac bushes are long gone, but the memories still remain.

The traditional old fashioned lilac, Syringa vulgaris, may have beautiful fragrant flowers in the Spring, but the flowers only last a week or two. They are somewhat problematic for the rest of the year. They are subject to powdery mildew, they stop flowering on older wood, and need proper pruning.  Things have since changed dramatically in the lilac world.

I had a few customers early last Spring ask if we had the repeat blooming lilac. I was a bit baffled, as I never heard of one before, and thought the customer was confusing it with the repeat blooming ‘Endless Summer’ Hydrangea. I had forgotten about those questions until a sales rep come to our nursery last September and asked if I wanted to look at some plant samples. He opened the back of the truck and I saw a dwarf lilac in a container in full bloom. Wow! I was impressed. Meet ‘Bloomerang’®, he said.

Syringa x Bloomerang® is an amazing new dwarf purple flowering lilac that flowers for months, not weeks.  It’s similar in shape and size to the Korean lilacs, but the flowers are larger, and invoke memories of the traditional lilac. The leaves are smaller than the traditional lilac, slightly glossy, and tend to be mildew resistant. One of my mom’s favorite lilac attributes was the fragrance. Bloomerang does have that distinctive lilac aroma, although it isn’t as strong as the old fashioned varieties. Considering there is almost four months worth of flowers, I feel that slightly less fragrant isn’t a bad thing.

The growth habit on Bloomerang® is tighter and shorter than the traditional lilac.  It will grow 4-5’ tall and close to 6’ wide. With pruning you should be able to maintain it to about 3-4’ tall. Since Bloomerang ® blooms so heavily in May, its important to trim off the spent flowers when its first flowering is done.  It This will speed up the rebloom time, and help keep a nice tight growth habit. It could take until mid-Summer to start again, but then it should bloom until frost.  It mixes well into the border, or you could use it as a foundation plant. I’m also thinking of using it as a container plant on my deck. The delicate lilac scent will add ambiance to your late night gatherings.

Even with a winter as harsh as the last, Bloomerang® would be a success story. It is hardy to an extreme cold of -40F . Feel free to buy one for any of your friends between here all the way to Maine.  Bloomerang® needs to have full sun for a minimum of 6 hours. Although it is resistant to some root rots,  it prefers well drained soil. Deer generally will not like Bloomerang® but I always recommend using a deer repellant when installing any new plant into the garden. 

There's no Berries like Snowberries

Just arrived at Williams!

If on Family Feud the question was “What is the Color of a Plant’s Berries?” I’m sure that the number one answer would be red. I think part of this association is with the red berried hollies that many decorate with during the holidays. Even though red is extremely popular, there are quite a few other colored berried plants that one can use for the landscape.

Last September, I was at Garden Center of America’s Fashion in Bloom, and found a great improvement on an old fashioned berry producing plants at the Monrovia Grower’s display. I first saw this plant in one of my horticulture classes at Rutgers, and thought it was pretty cool when I saw it twenty five years ago. When I saw these this year, I stopped in my tracks and was 'wowed.' This Plant is from the Genus Symphoricarpos. Commonly known as either a Snowberry or Coralberry, the Symphoricarpos is a plant that is native to the North Eastern United States. A French botanist Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau classified it in the 18th century. Virtually all Native American tribes in its range used this plant as a medicinal for treating a wide variety of ailments from upset stomach to eye inflammation. When its twigs are honed in a fire, they were converted into sharp-tip tools. The plant has been cultivated for several centuries but its true garden worthiness has only just started to be proven with recent advances by a Dutch breeding program. These newer varieties produce more uniform fruit, and the berries tend to persist for an extremely long time.

Before there’s a berry there needs to be a flower. These produce a small whitish pink flower in the summer. Berries are produced in clusters. Sometimes these clusters can have over 25 berries in just one of cluster. The plant is then covered with these clusters. The fruit starts to color up in the fall.

Each variety has its own appealing colors: Bright Fantasy’s berries show a bright snowy white color, Charming Fantasy offers a range from pink to white, and Scarlet Pearl produces a larger berry whose color is reddish purple. The berries hold up well as a cut flower and will last several weeks in an arrangement.

Although snowberries are pretty in the fall, they are outstanding in the winter. Once the fall has left this plant without its leaves, the berries hang on the stem into the winter. It’s a great plant to have outside of a window so one can look upon its beauty in January when everything in the landscape looks drab and dreary.

The snowberry grows moderately fast and will generally mature to a height and width of about 4’. It will produce its best berries in Full to partial sun. It’s extremely tolerant of cold winters and can survive even into zone 3 where temperatures dip to 40 below zero. Since I’ve seem them flower profusely in a growers container, I’m thinking that they would be great in a patio planter, but I haven’t tried this out yet. Since they flower on new wood in the summer, and berries are produced in the fall, pruning should be done in the early Spring. I would remove some of the interior wood when pruning, so to let light into the center of the plant to increase the fruit production. Snowberries are a great addition to the landscape since they also become a late season food for many wildlife species. They can make a great hedge plant, since they are far easier to manage than privet or forsythia. They would also make a great accent for the edge of a woodland garden. If you plant one in the front yard, you may have to be careful since you may get people knocking at your door asking “What is that cool plant with the berries?”