Erin McLaughlin, the editor of Canadian Gardener, regards hybridization as a boon for novice gardeners seeking easier-to-care-for plants who aren’t concerned with varietal authenticity. She compares reblooming hybrids to store-bought pesto. “They’re like a prepared ingredient rather than something you make from scratch,” she says. It’s not “cheating,” she contends: “Instead of cajoling plants, we’re given more sophisticated offerings that can make for a happier garden. If you have repeat bloomers—roses, clematis, lilacs—you can have that sensation for a longer time, especially in our really, really short growing season in Canada.”
Reblooming plants’ ability to do double duty is part of their appeal for many novice gardeners who expect horticulture to work overtime and to provide value, says Proven Winners’ marketing director Marshall Dirks. “People want more from their plants,” he says. Never has the company marketed a plant as vigorously as it is marketing the Bloomerang, he says. “The name is fantastic. And people love lilacs.”
The reason people love lilacs, of course, is because of their temporal timetable. Their first (and only) flowering is greeted with joy, tinged by the knowledge it will be fleeting, poetically so; no one has ever complained of being bored by lilacs. Tamper with that and you hit a primal nerve, as the Bloomerang clearly has.
Yet demand for the plant also reveals a culture in which a desire for instant (and repeated) gratification and convenience has extended into the garden. McKee upholds the Bloomerang as a symbol of the rampant commercialization of gardening: “When you can have any flower whenever you want it, that’s not gardening. That’s shopping,” he writes. But he views its arrival as even more pernicious than that. Not only does the plant muddle once-sacrosanct lilac season, it undermines the fundamental gardening tenet that patience and hard work are rewarded: “It corrupts the humbling tension of waiting months and months for rewards in the garden and thinking they’re well-deserved,” McKee writes.
Within the gardening hierarchy, the Bloomerang’s arrival has heightened class divisions. Marjorie Harris makes the distinction between “plant people” and “decorators,” noting that many people now view their garden as a room to be fashionably appointed. For them, the Bloomerang might offer the perfect accent, like a throw pillow: “Maybe for some people a lilac colour in August is going to look great because you don’t see that colour in a lot of other things.” Westcott-Gratton believes the plant could have a place in smaller balcony gardens: “Or if it’s in a container and used as a focal point that needs always to be in bloom,” he says.
He believes the Bloomerang, which can be grown in zones 3 through 7 and costs US$19.95, will be a tough sell to hard-core gardeners. “There’s definite snobbery,” he says. “Rock Garden Society types and real plant-aholics are turned on by something more subtle, by plants that are seen to be untampered by man’s hands and more perfect because of that.” The hoi polloi, meanwhile, is lining up with competitor reblooming lilacs such as “Josee” and “Miss Kim” also hitting the market. Which means that lilac season, once a poignant, transient rite of spring, is destined to be up our noses all summer long.
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