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Lilac: a few weeks a year, and ninety seconds of preparation
Cut lilac has the narrowest window of any common flower. The main season runs for a few weeks in spring, glasshouse stems stretch it slightly, and that is the whole year. When it appears in a catalogue, that is the moment to buy it.
The second thing to know is that lilac wilts faster than almost anything else on the bench. Not because it is weak, but because of how it is usually put into water.
The cut is most of the outcome
Lilac stems are woody. A flat cut across woody tissue takes up very little water, which is why a bunch can droop by the evening of the day it arrived when it had a week in it.
Doing it properly takes two minutes. Recut on a slant with secateurs, then split the end lengthways two or three centimetres, or crush it. Strip every leaf, including the ones at the top. Lilac foliage competes with the flowers for water and reliably outlives them.
Then a vase with plenty of water and somewhere cool. Lilac drinks hard, the level visibly drops, and it wants topping up daily rather than weekly.
Scent and volume
The fragrance is powerful and fills a closed room quickly. One or two branches is plenty in a bedroom, and a full armful in a small flat becomes physically noticeable by nightfall.
Volume is deceptive. A branch looks large and consists mostly of air between the flower clusters, so bunches need more stems than the eye first suggests.
1. Three branches make a proper table bouquet. 2. Five to seven become an armful that wants a wide necked vase. 3. Beyond ten the scent and the volume start competing rather than combining.
Colour runs from white through pale mauve to deep purple, and cut lilac holds that colour steadily for as long as the flowers last.
Lilac is not a flower to buy ahead. Buy it on the day you intend to give it.
Where it belongs
Lilac reads as warm, domestic and unmistakably seasonal. It suits a mother, a grandmother, a teacher, a spring occasion, or anyone with a memory attached to the smell, which is a surprising number of people.
It suits an office or a hospital room far less well, for the same two reasons: the fragrance is too assertive and the vase life is too short.
For a delivery across Melbourne, ask for water on the cut ends. Lilac loses turgor faster than other flowers, and a couple of hours dry in warm weather shows immediately.
JFLOO lists lilac in season, and it sells through quickly while it is there. For a fixed date, check availability early, and when the bunch arrives spend the ninety seconds on the cut and the leaves.
