The Bloomerang lilac won’t be available at your local nursery until next spring, but already it’s a sensation among the gardening cognoscenti. True to its cutesy name, the dynamo dwarf shrub upends lilac logic by flowering in early spring, again in summer, then reblooming as the leaves turn—a hybridizing innovation that can be viewed as wondrous or as horrifying. The American plant-breeding behemoth Proven Winners Plants is banking on the public’s desire for lilacs 24/7; it launched the Bloomerang in the spring of 2008 with the sort of fanfare that usually accompanies summer action flicks. Plants were sent out to gardening writers across the continent with the hope they’d produce rave reviews. Spring Meadow Nursery of Grand Haven, Mich., offered the hybrid in limited supply, as did several mail order companies. It sold out immediately, with thwarted prospective buyers clamouring to be put on waiting lists.
The arrival of a reblooming lilac has drawn a fresh line in the soil between the old and the new gardening guard. Those who eagerly await the species’ fragrant flowering as a harbinger of spring find the prospect of lilacs blooming again in September akin to watching a burlesque dancer perform the same act into her dotage—untimely and kind of creepy. Beaverton, Ont.-based horticulturalist Stephen Westcott-Gratton, an editor-at-large at Canadian Gardening, was offered a Bloomerang but turned it down. He acknowledges the species signals a revolution in lilac breeding. But as a serious gardener he embraces “sequence of bloom,” the hard-wired gardening tenet that a good garden is meticulously mapped to evolve with the seasons, no repeats allowed. “The whole point of living in a climate like this is the change of season, and each fraction of the change in season brings new plants,” he says, observing that he has little interest in sniffing lilacs as frost approaches. “I don’t know how I feel about colours like that and fragrance like that in the autumn,” he says. “I don’t even like autumn crocuses.” (Wescott-Gratton even has his issues with the Preston lilac, a variety that blooms a few weeks after the common Syringa. “It seems out of season even at that point in the year,” he explains.) He also isn’t fond of the Bloomerang’s lavender-blue flowers, which he describes as “kind of boring; like the common lilac, but not so deep.”
Nursery worker Bradford McKee expressed even more outrage in a very amusing post on Slate.com, railing that the arrival of a hybrid that one website described as “a flower machine for four months or more every year!” will ruin what we traditionally think of as lilac season: “In the annals of plant novelties that cheapen gardening for the sake of enriching it, I can’t think of anything so dumb,” he fumed.
Not all plant people are so vexed. Thomas Hobbs, the Vancouver-based gardening writer and owner of Southlands Nursery Ltd., is charmed by the idea of the Bloomerang, though he has yet to see the shrub: “I think it’s wonderful. I’d love to see lilacs twice a year,” he says.
Gardening maven and author Marjorie Harris was also willing to give the Bloomerang a go. She planted two in her downtown Toronto garden last year and deems them “adorable,” with reservation: “They were very pretty in lilac season,” she reports. “And I assume that if I do a little nipping and pruning, they’ll bloom again sometime in summertime.” Still, the concept is “kind of weird,” she says: “It’s discombobulating to have plants bloom out of what I think is their season.”
Love it or loathe it, the Bloomerang is the latest symbol of the brave new world of gardening—a landscape of hybridized plants that rebloom, “self-clean” (eliminating the need to deadhead) and do pretty much everything but fertilize themselves, though that too is probably in the works. The plant is destined to join Knockout roses and Endless Summer hydrangeas, two monster brands that extend their species’ blooming seasons, sort of like the flora equivalent of cosmetic surgery.
Proven Winners, the Bloomerang’s creator, has spurred much of the innovation. Established in 1992 by three U.S. plant propagators, the Sycamore, Ill.-based US$500-million enterprise is renowned for breeding low-maintainance, disease-resistant, “performance” plants sold at nurseries and garden centres throughout North America. Its popular high-octane petunias, known as “Supertunias,” self-clean like an oven. This spring, the company introduced the “first true dwarf buddleia” which attracts butterflies and self-cleans.
Even McKee, who savages the Bloomerang, concedes that hybridizing has yielded “marvellous new sizes, shapes, colours, and traits for plants,” a distinction somewhat like someone saying “I’d never have Botox, but tooth whitening is fine.” The southern magnolia hybrid Little Gem is one of his favourites, he writes, because it “stays compact and—crucially—doesn’t drop leaves by the bale all over your garden.” Hobbs is another fan of hybridizing. “It’s not a scary thing; it’s a good thing,” he says. He likes twice-blooming bearded irises: “Double your value; double your reward,” he says.
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