In article , Ann
wrote:

(paghat) expounded:

The newer cultivars are the most forgiving. But if you're merely telling
us that in Ookook Land nobody has has ever had any trouble getting lilacs
to bloom, then wow, that's such very special place.

Lots of newer hybrids planted in dooryards of 250 year old colonials.

Too bad you're just being snotty, as otherwise you would finally have
spoken the truth. If you are seriously claiming the lilacs in your
neighborhood are a quarter-millenia old, why wouldn't I believe you? Could
it be because lilacs never live that long & the oldest lilacs in North
America are a mere 120 years old on Makinac Island?

While wild shrubs were brought to North America in the early 1700s (at
which time they were planted primarily in graveyards) virtually all garden
or front-of-house cultivars presently grown, if they actually are the
oldest ones, date only to the 1880s-1920s. There ARE still a very few
thriving thickets of true wild non-hybridized lilacs dating to the early
1800s in the Northeast, & to the 1840s or 1850s in the Northwest -- not
individually old trees like those profound rarities on Makinac Island of
course, but continuously renewed from suckers & seeds -- none of these
thickets are in peoples' front yards even if the houses are built on
forgotten graveyards, because naturalized wild lilacs need acres of space
& no other cultivation in the vicinity to perpetuate themselves.

If you were a credible witness I'd be truly excited to learn about that
magical colonial neighborhood devoid of modern cultivars (which begin in
Victorian France & began arriving stateside in the 1880s), a neighborhood
which did not participate in the first wave of serious lilac popularity
during the fin d'siecle, but have instead preserved for a quarter-millenia
only the descendants of natural wild graveyard plants just like those from
Transylvania. If it WERE true you shouldn't be kvetching at me for
disbelieving in the little town where time stood still & you can get a
free melmac plate-set with every tank of gas & a flophouse bed for a
nickel a night; rather, you should be writing it up for the horticultural
journals, because it's honestly too darned cool. Just don't add the part
about them blooming in the shade or the editor will know you're makin' it
all up.

Where you are
lilacs may need more sun because they don't get as much in the rainy
northwest - unless you're on the lee side of the mountains.

Making this up as you go along? Don't tell anyone our secret because we
already have too many moving here, but it scarsely ever rains here in the
summer, but only autumn through spring. The Northwest is great lilac
country, & there's hardly a block in any town on Puget Sound without
several. The sun goes down after nine o'clock at night at high summer, so
the lilacs just bask & bask developing their buds for the following
spring.

I'm pointing out the fact that there are numerous reasons why lilacs
don't flower, one of which is soil pH, the usual case around here in
acid-soil New England. You have experienced the lack of sun thing.
Different environments, different outcomes.

Actually my original post noted several & probably all the possible
reasons for failure to bloom including acidity as an occasional cause
especially for those less forgiving early cultivars -- plus I concluded
with my sense that three to five years is a NORMAL length of time for a
some baby lilacs not to have bloomed, so there MIGHT not actually be a
problem. I think it was a good post that insists on no single answer but
gave enough info to assist anyone trying to figure out why THEIR
particular shrubs haven't bloomed.

But you seem to have read only as far as the #1 cause of lilacs failing to
bloom -- then you strangely began to allege that the lilacs in your
neighborhood are 250 years old & bloom in the shade -- which even if you
hadn't made that up wouldn't change the broader realities I outlined.

-paggers
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