Dandy Standout

Any ideal hobby should have variety, and gardening seems to have it in spades (yes, pun intended).  Gardens provide variety of species, cultivar, and plant size.  Variety of color, variety in foliage (in fact, some foliage is "variegated"!), variety in season of bloom, and variety of leaf shape, petal shape, and plant form.  Gardeners induce variety (or chaos) themselves by how they site a plant, how they fertilize and care for it, and how they protect it from temperature extremes or insects.

And every season, it seems, some plants seem to decide all on their own to step up and stand out, to shine or sparkle.  This year the first plant to do so seems to be the lilac 'Yankee Doodle', a relatively recently introduced (1985) cultivar of S. vulgaris selected by the late Jesuit priest, Father John Fiala at his farm in Medina, Ohio, the acreage he called Falconskeape.

My 'Yankee Doodle' caught my eye today as I was engaged in my first spring mowing, mowing not so much grass as a crop of rampant henbit, chickweed, and other spring nuisances.  'Yankee Doodle' was planted in 2003 among a line of right lilacs along the west border of the garage pad, a line that perfumes the entire yard if provided the proper temperature and a gentle breezes comes out of the south or west.  My intention at the time of planting it was to both screen out the two-foot tall ugly concrete wall that constitutes the edge of the garage pad, and, to create just the sort of saturated fragrance showstopper that it has become.  My lilacs amply fill both roles.

Most years, 'Yankee Doodle' struggles, lanky, tall, and sparse, its stems prone to borers and breakage, as are the cultivars that flank it, 'Nazecker' to the right and 'Wonderblue' to the left.  I should complain less about them since this bed is labeled "Forsythia Bed" on my maps and contains not a single forsythia, all perished or shovel-pruned for their inconsistent bloom.  This year, somehow, 'Yankee Doodle' bloomed extra-prolifically and it is the most prominent lilac of its immediate group, indeed of the whole line.  It is at the end of its bloom cycle as pictured here, the deepest purple single flowers of lilac-dom faded just a bit here by age and a recent rain.  And yet, still it caught my eye as I mowed, a 'Yankee Doodle' all dandied up and showing off its best side in this, its seemingly random year to stand out.   So now, 'Yankee Doodle' fading, I'm left to wonder what species, what variety, what plain, regularly overlooked plant will step up to be the next Cinderella or Dandy.