Henry Arthur Bright’s Observations on Lilac-Tide
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
May 4, 1879
Dearest readers,
Let us journey back through time to a May long ago, when Henry Arthur Bright took pen to page on this day in his beloved A Year in a Lancashire Garden.
He writes:
“May set in this year with (as Horace Walpole somewhere says) ‘its usual severity.’
We felt it all the more after the soft, warm summer weather we had experienced in April.
The Lilac, which is only due with us on the 1st of May, was this year in flower on the 28th of April.
Green Gooseberry tarts, which farther south are considered a May-day dish, we hardly hope to see in this colder latitude for ten days later, and now these cold east winds will throw back everything.
No season is like "Lilac-tide," as it has been quaintly called, in this respect.
Besides the Lilac itself, there are the long plumes of the white Broom, the brilliant scarlet of the hybrid Rhododendrons, the delicious blossoms, both pink and yellow, of the Azaleas, the golden showers of the Laburnum, and others too numerous to mention.
A Judas-tree at an angle of the house is in bud.
The Général Jacqueminot between the vineries has given us a Rose already.
The foliage of the large forest trees is particularly fine this year.
The Horse Chestnuts were the first in leaf, and each branch is now holding up its light of waxen blossom.
The Elms came next, the Limes, the Beeches, and then the Oaks.
Yet still ‘the tender Ash delays to clothe herself when all the woods are green,’ and is all bare as in mid-winter.
This, however, if the adage about the Oak and the Ash be true, should be prophetic of a fine hot summer.”
Bright’s tender witness to the rhythms of his Lancashire garden reminds us all how nature’s timing can both surprise and delight, wrapping May in its fragrant and kaleidoscopic embrace.
