You've found the famous Dave's Garden website! Join this friendly global community that shares tips and ideas for home and gardens, along with seeds and plants!
Check out the DG homepage for a brief overview of what you'll find in this gardening mega-site.
Login
If you don't have an account yet, visit the registration page to sign up.
GuyS (StarhillForest) kindly let me move this photo from a thread about transplanting a lilac into the PlantFiles where more people can enjoy it. Here is what he told us about it:
In 1988 I brought home a huge lilac planted on my wife's grandmother's farm in Paton, Iowa in 1875. I hand-dug a 5000-pound rootball 6 feet in diameter and 3 feet deep, lifting it into my trailer with a large trackhoe.
This picture shows the "Old Paton Lilac" settled into its new home, as seen from our front door in central Illinois. If you can find back issues of Fine Gardening from 1989 at your library, you can see the whole transplanting process, step by step ("Rescuing the Old Paton Lilac").
I'm sure I "wasted" much more time and effort on that tree than it would have been worth to anyone else, but sometimes you just gotta do things like that.
That is absolutely fantastic looking in that setting.
I wonder how they got the huge trunks? My lilacs send up a multitude of suckers every year, and my pruning book says to cut off the oldest canes and let some new ones grow that will bloom better. I would say this picture totally negates that advice. And since I can't brag on the prolific blooms of new growth, I think I might try keeping the oldest canes and eliminating all the new suckers.
Anyway, thanks for getting this in the PF so we can all see it.
Thanks for sharing that picture! It is beautiful. I'm willing to bet two of my lilac bushes in my yard are also as old as this one, circa 1875. Now that I see how nice and cleaned up yours is I'm going to have to do the same to mine. Truly surreal!
Jim/Omaha.
