Lilac

Common lilac is a deciduous shrub or small, many-stemmed tree of the olive family, reaching six or seven metres and sending up suckers that over decades can form a small thicket. Its heart-shaped leaves grow in opposite pairs, and in early summer it bears dense clusters of small, scented, four-lobed tubular flowers, usually lilac to mauve and now and then white. It is native to rocky hills in the southern Balkans, but reached northern European gardens from Ottoman ones at the end of the sixteenth century, the diplomat Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq being credited with sending cuttings to Carolus Clusius around 1562. It came to the American colonies in the eighteenth century, has naturalised widely, and is the state flower of New Hampshire. Its flowers are edible and flavour honey, sugar and sweets. English lore held it unlucky to wear white lilac on any day but May Day; in Norfolk purple lilac, a mourning colour, was unlucky too, and the flowers often lined coffins and decorated graves. A white flower with five petals rather than four was a luck lilac, a gift from the fae. For Cunningham lilac drives evil from wherever it is planted or strewn, and New Englanders, he says, first planted it to keep evil off their land.