Common Lilac Tree Seeds (Syringa vulgaris

The fragrance of May. The shrub that outlives everything planted around it.

Syringa vulgaris, the Common Lilac, is the most universally loved flowering shrub in the temperate world, its dense clusters of fragrant purple and white flowers in late spring producing a scent so deeply familiar and so intensely pleasurable that it has been written about by poets and preserved in perfumes for centuries. It blooms at the same time every year, reliable as a calendar. It tolerates cold that kills most other flowering shrubs. And it lives for so long that lilac bushes are often found still growing at the sites of long-demolished farmhouses, outlasting every human structure built around them. If you are looking to buy Lilac seeds or grow common lilac from seed, you are planting something that may still be flowering long after everything else in the garden is gone.

• Dense fragrant flower clusters in shades of purple, lilac, and white, the defining scent of late spring
• Extremely cold-hardy, one of the most cold-tolerant flowering shrubs available in temperate horticulture
• Extraordinarily long-lived, with documented specimens over 200 years old still flowering reliably
• Seed-grown plants produce natural variation in flower color and form not available in grafted nursery stock
• Attracts swallowtail butterflies, native bees, and hummingbirds during its flowering period

Things you probably did not know about the Common Lilac

A lilac in New Hampshire has been blooming since 1750. The Wentworth Coolidge Mansion in Portsmouth, New Hampshire has a lilac believed to have been planted by Governor Benning Wentworth around 1750, making it the oldest documented lilac in North America. It still flowers every spring. It was growing before the American Revolution and has outlasted every human being who ever owned the property.

Walt Whitman used lilacs as the central symbol of his elegy for Abraham Lincoln. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed is considered one of the finest poems in American literature. Whitman chose lilacs not because of any personal association with Lincoln but because the lilacs were blooming across the country on the day Lincoln was shot in April 1865, and the scent became permanently associated in his memory with the moment the news arrived.

The fragrance is produced by a compound called lilial. The characteristic scent of Lilac flowers comes primarily from indole, lilial, and farnesol, compounds that are extremely difficult to stabilize in commercial perfumery. True lilac fragrance cannot be effectively extracted or synthesized in a way that replicates the living flower, which is why no commercial lilac perfume smells exactly like a real one. The flower itself cannot be replicated.

Seed-grown lilacs take longer to bloom but develop stronger root systems. Grafted nursery lilacs bloom in 3 to 4 years. Seed-grown lilacs may take 5 to 7 years to first flower but develop on their own roots, meaning they do not sucker in the rootstock variety and produce flowers true to their own genetics. Old specimen lilacs that have been growing for a century are almost always on their own roots.

Growing Details

• Botanical Name: Syringa vulgaris
• Stratification: Required, 60 to 90 days cold stratification
• USDA Zones: 3 to 7
• Soil: Well-drained, neutral to slightly alkaline, tolerates a range of conditions
• Light: Full sun, requires at least 6 hours of direct sun for best flowering
• Height: 8 to 15 feet
• Spread: 6 to 12 feet
• Growth Rate: Moderate, 1 to 2 feet per year

Plant it where you will walk past it every May. The fragrance alone is worth the wait.