When I walked through the door, I could smell them before I saw them.
Lilacs — jars full of the cut blooms overflowed on the kitchen table. I inhaled deeply, one of my favorite fragrances and, because of this, one of my favorite flowers. My children had been cutting them from the yard and bringing them in, one handful after another.
I was given this lilac bush, along with a car full of other treasures, from a local nursery that was going out of business around the time we moved to the farm. We were busy with house renovations and massive repairs around the farm, but I still needed to dig the holes to plant everything we hauled home. I was very pregnant at the time and my sciatica prevented me from making the step-down motion it takes to break ground with a shovel.
All this to say, there wasn’t a lot of thought put into where to plant my scrawny, root-bound lilac bush. I remember thinking, “Weren’t lilacs once planted by outhouses to mask the smell?” I opted to just stick ours by the chicken coop and see what would happen. And, into the ground it went.
Over the next few years, this lilac bush lived but it didn’t grow much. In fact, it didn’t do much of anything. It maybe had three or four clusters of blooms per season, but that was it. It didn’t seem to get any taller or bushier. It was just there. Yet, all along our road were examples of tall, thick lilac bushes with showy displays of flowers. It had me wondering why ours was so . . . underwhelming. However, in the grand scheme of raising kids and livestock, troubleshooting my melancholy plant wasn’t high on the list of things to worry about.
Fast forward to last spring when we decided to move the chicken coop because our ladies needed to be moved to higher ground. All the years of scratching and rooting around in their run carved out a low spot that began to fill with water whenever it rained. So we picked a different spot in the yard, maybe ten feet away, and rotated it 90 degrees. It seemed like a small change that didn’t take much effort, but it made a big difference to our chickens.
Surprisingly, it also made a big difference to my lilac bush. . .
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