Of Cats & Lilacs

[akirlu]

Yesterday was a big day for Spike. In the morning, in the usual pre-tuna truce, she managed to get fully nose-to-nose with Tinka and hold for several beats before freaking out and hissing and squalling. Then all was chaos, of course, but before that, there was a full heart-beat, maybe two, when they were a whisker apart and simply regarding each other. This is progress.

Then last night, while I was putting away some dishes, Spike finally decided that yes, she was brave enough to go outside. She went out in that very low-hunkered way she has when trying anything new -- Spike is not a bold cat by nature -- with her tail lashing to beat hell. But out she went and stayed out for several hours. I have come to the conclusion that Spike is the sort of cat who easily gets overstimulated, so anything new must be approached very slowly indeed. There's been a lot of new in her life since she came to us, so I am very pleased that this putatively "mostly outdoor cat" has finally begun making her first tentative explorations out again.

Meanwhile, I love the way our neighborhood smells. Our own tiny lilac is only just starting to bloom, very tentatively. But every time I step out in our drive I am awash in the scent of lilac. The whole street is perfumed. Next door has two tall blooming lilac strubs shading the porch, and across the street has a little one snaggling its way through the arbor. There are spikes of purple and lavender visible in every block, usually on big, established trees. There is something wonderfully solid and bucolic about a big 19th century house with a lilac blooming beside it. It feels so gosh-darned Our Town, it makes a person wanna say Gee, Whiz.

Gee, Whiz.

Comments

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

Gardens that smell good remind me of my first trip to Hawaii - yea, the perfume of tropical flowers is really like that.

I've been trying to grow night-blooming jasmine, and or gardenia to remind me- but always manage to kill them. Our lemon tree tree is the next best thing though (The "Lemon tree very pretty and the lemon flower is sweet" lyric is not out of line)

Now, usually what I smell in our neighborhood is during evening runs, and then it's the sweet smell of, uh, hamburgers. Or barbeque. A slightly different kind of Our Town.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I've never been to Hawaii (!), but I have some experience of the scent of ginger, tiare, and gardenia when they are massed, so I can imagine. Surprisingly, there are times of year when Los Angeles smells of perfume in the evenings, too. There's a flowering tree that's cultivated a lot there -- I think of it as flowering boxwood, but none of the pictures I can find of buxus look anything like the tree I remember -- that sprouts clusters of tiny ivory white flowers in the spring, and the smell is just heaven.

For scented things that grow well in the Bay Area, you might try: honeysuckle, wisteria, rosa rugosa, and pink jasmine. I know my mom had good luck with all of them in San Jose.

[chiefwirehead.livejournal.com]

Oddly, the scent of plumeria is what is most notable in Hawaii. I had never heard of it before going there.

Ah wisteria - one of my favorite smells, and its not an easy plant to kill, either. It (well, mine) only bloom for about 2 weeks at the beginning of april. It smells like spicy gumdrops to me.

Star Jasmine works here as well - that smell always reminds me of typing and driver's ed (not sure what Freud would think of that) because at summer school during my high school days there were planter boxes full of them.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Pink jasmine, as I recall tends to bloom April into May, and maybe early June, in the Bay Area. The scent is really fine.

Star jasmine -- which as I understand it, isn't a true jasmine at all -- yes, that's definitely a "summer school" scent. I think every school I attended in San Jose had that stuff growing in planters and beds. It's hard to kill and requires little maintenance, I think are its primary institutional virtues. I've never cared for the scent much.

(The other plants that were perennial favorites with SJUSD in my childhood were ivy, and pyracantha -- presumably for similar reasons.)

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Our own tiny lilac is only just starting to bloom, very tentatively.

All hunkered down, with its tail thrashing to beat hell. But it's blooming!

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I love lilacs! Told you that before, didn't I.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Large, shiny leaves, clusters of white to cream flowers (with sticky orange seeds revealed when the seed-pod opens)? Sounds like Pittosporum (a south-African/Australian genus, I think). P. tobira is most common as a shrub or small tree, and is sometimes called "Victorian Boxwood", though P. undulatum has that as its official common name. For another extemely fragrant (though otherwise unnoticible big green bush) there's Osmanthus fragrans ("sweet olive").

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

For me, one of the greatest perversities of Chicago’s weather is that early in May, for the week that the lilacs are in bloom, there’s a cold wave, killing the scent. Just about every deity-blasted year. Temperatures just dropped from the 70's to the 50's, and by golly, the lilacs are out.
*GRUMP*

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Lilacs seem to exert a powerful influence over those who grew up with them. I can't think of what scents really spike my own memories and nostalgia the way a lilac gets to a person who associates them with childhood. Maybe the scent of rain on cedar bark.

My favorite scent is gardenia, though not in perfume. I wish we could grow them up here on the windy end of the peninsula.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I now have the image of little lilac blossoms going everywhere because the little hunkered lilac is lashing its tail. Hah!

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

That's okay, you can tell me again. I quite like them, myself.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Man, that does righteously suck. They're pretty enough, and all, visually speaking, but what makes lilacs lilacs is the smell.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, although I do like the scent very much, and lilacs in the neighborhood are a thing I do associate with Sweden, and therefore childhood, the scent of lilac isn't particularly one of my childhood nostalgia triggers. Childhood, for me, smells of my grandmother's rose hedge (rosa rugosa), stearin wax candles, lily of the valley, red clover and buttercup in wet meadow grass, smultron, newly baked bullar, hard rectangular crayons on salvaged brown paper, and mildew in my great-grandfather's shed. Oh, and a hundred and twelve other things, besides. What childhood smells like -- that's either a post in itself, or possibly a story prompt.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Victorian Boxwood! Yes, that's it! Or at least, googling finds me this image for Victorian Box, which is Pittosporum undulatum, and that's the tree I was thinking of. They say it's also known as "mock orange" so now I know what that is.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Thanks to the mighty Don Fitch, below, I can now also suggest looking for Pittosporum undulatum, alternately known as Victorian Box(wood) or mock orange, if you're interested in things that produce that lovely perfumed air when they bloom. They do very well in Southern California, and I would think they would manage in the Bay Area as long as it was one of the more temperate bits.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Actually, you know what _one_ "mock orange" is. More widely-known & longer-grown under that common name are probably several Philadelphus species. The one I remember from childhood in Ohio was a fountain-like large shrub with thin-petaled white flowers with an intensely sweet odor that wasn't as heavy as either Orange or Pittosporum turned out to be when we moved to California. And there's a Choisia sp. also sometimes called "mock Orange", or "Mexican Orange". (AFAIK, the "Victorian Boxwood" gets its name from the Australian state, rather than directly from the Queen/Era, and is a relatively recent introduction into the nursery trade in the warmer parts of the U.S. Whether its wood (or that of the true Buxus species) is actually sometimes used for making boxes is not known to me.)