Lilacs revisited: The Lilac Tree

Last weekend, I spied these big, white blossom clusters off towards the landlady’s house, and hopped over to investigate with my camera. This beautiful tree is enormous – sort of like a great big poof ball of a tree. Try as I might, I could not determine its identity with my books, but the leaves and flower clusters seemed to resemble lilacs.

Yesterday evening, our landlady surprised us with an enormous bouquet of these overwhelmingly fragrant flowers, and solved the mystery: this is a lilac tree (as opposed to a lilac bush, which I've always called a tree). This particular lilac tree is well over one hundred years old, and still going strong!

The lilac tree is the third variety of lilac we’ve explored thus far at Arboreality. The other is the Korean lilac (also referred to as the Chinese, Manchurian, or "Miss Kim" lilac, possibly related to slightly different varieties), which we saw on Mother's Day. The Korean lilac is a dwarf lilac bush of comparable beauty and fragrance to the other lilacs we've seen.