Lilac Meaning: First Love and the Scent of a Short Season

Lilacs cheat. Other flowers have to earn their symbolism through color or shape; the lilac walks in on scent alone. It blooms for barely two weeks a year, usually in May, and for those two weeks a single shrub can perfume a whole street — and then it's gone until next spring. Ask anyone with a lilac in their childhood yard and watch their face change. That's the meaning, right there, before any dictionary gets involved.

What the lilac symbolizes

The lilac's classic meaning is first love — specifically the first emotions of love, the early, unrepeatable kind. The Victorians assigned it that meaning half because of the season (lilacs open when spring is newest) and half because of the scent's strange power over memory. Nothing recalls a particular May like lilac does.

Color splits the meaning in two:

• Purple lilac — first love. The classic. Also spirituality in some readings — the color does some of the work.
• White lilac — youthful innocence. The gentler cousin, traditional for new babies and young friendships.
• Deep magenta lilac — love and passion, for when "first emotions" have clearly progressed.

There's a shadow meaning too. Victorian widows wore lilac during later mourning stages — the flower of love remembered rather than love lost, a softer color than black for a softer stage of grief. First love and remembrance turn out to be the same flower, which anyone who's had a first love could have told the Victorians.

Syringa: the myth in the name

The lilac's botanical name, Syringa, comes from a Greek story that isn't especially romantic once you look at it. The nymph Syrinx, pursued by the god Pan, escaped by turning herself into a hollow reed — and Pan, finding the reeds, cut them into the first panpipes. Syrinx means pipe or tube, and lilac stems are conveniently hollow; early flutes really were carved from them.

So the flower of first love is named for a woman who wanted, very firmly, to be left alone. Floriography has always had a sense of humor.

A flower that outlives the house

Lilacs are famously long-lived — shrubs can pass a hundred years — and in New England you can find them still blooming beside cellar holes where the farmhouse rotted away generations ago. Someone planted a lilac by a door in 1870, and the door is gone, and the lilac is not. New Hampshire made it the state flower for exactly this stubbornness; Walt Whitman built his great elegy for Lincoln, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, on the same image of the flower that returns each spring carrying the memory with it.

For a bloom that lasts two weeks, the plant is nearly immortal. The eighth wedding anniversary is the lilac anniversary — early enough that the love is young, with the plant's whole century implied.

Keeping cut lilacs alive, briefly

Fair warning: lilacs are divas in the vase. They drink through green wood, so the old florist trick is to cut the woody stems vertically an inch up (or lightly crush them), strip all leaves below water, and give them deep, cool water immediately. Even pampered, expect three to five days — this is a flower that teaches you to enjoy things while they're here, in the vase as on the shrub. More vase-life science in how to make cut flowers last longer.

When to give lilacs

• To an early love, when roses would say too much and daisies too little: purple lilac says exactly the right amount.
• To parents of a new baby: white lilac is the traditional welcome.
• To someone missing a person or a place: lilac is remembrance with the lights on.

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Lilac season never ends in Bloomette, our hand-painted flower studio for iPhone — its soft purple clusters live in the Flower Corner year-round, waiting for a nostalgic bouquet. For the meanings behind the rest of the palette, start with the language of flowers.