“When you are ninety it’s your privilege to go to sleep in company if you choose. She was tired of answering [the reporter’s] questions anyhow. Wagon train, redksins, road-agents, fiddle-de-dum. Folks were mighty funny about the past, picking it over like rats on a rubbish heap; the greatest trash was what they fancied most, and Plummer cast a longer shadow nowadays than a dozen better men who had helped hang him. Nobody ever asked her about the first shingled house in town or the first piped water, nor cared who had brought rose slips and p’inies all the way from the States, whose hands built the grain elevator, whose the church, who had put up the first bridge across West Fork.”
Naomi Lane Babson I Am Lidian, 1951
On June 3, 1980, I arrived in Montana to advocate for those grain elevators and first bridges whose history Lidian wished the young reporter would cover. It was a far easier trip than her Bozeman Trail wagon journey. I’d left my 1968 Dodge Dart in the Washington National Airport parking lot for its new owner and added my small cache of furniture to a Mayflower van headed West. I arrived at Helena’s airport, big gray Russian blue cat, flimsy K-Mart trunk and a couple suitcases in tow.
A day later, I purchased a stick-shift Toyota Tercel and began lurching up 6th Avenue to my new job in the Montana Historical Society’s Preservation Office. As if that transition wasn’t enough, I arrived home at the end of my first workday to find my sleeping bag, trunk, and single melamine place-setting gone. The property management crew had cleared out the wrong apartment; stacked all my belongings in storage; but miraculously and irrationally left the cat.
No matter. I appeared to have stepped into some unannounced lavish lilac festival. Every yard bloomed. Every desk sported a bouquet. That clean sweet scent edged the air at night. For Victorians—maybe for me–lilacs represent new love.
In that first June week, I had yet to learn how long and dense our winters could be, how unlikely a trustable spring was to find her way here any sooner than Memorial Day. I had only begun to suspect that crocus and daffodils and tulips arrived by struggling up through snow crusts as best they could against south-facing house foundations. I didn’t know that forsythia, the shrub we counted on for early March bouquets in my Kansas hometown, fought to grow here. I didn’t understand that blue-lined roads on section maps would be snow and ice rimmed through June. In that early 1980 summer, I reveled in those Helena June evenings made soft and ripe and sensual with lilacs. In all the tangled breathing green landscape of suburban Maryland and Virginia that I’d just left, I couldn’t remember lilacs.
I was equally naïve about work—about just what manmade resources needed saving in Montana. For a decade, I’d lived among nineteenth century brick row houses, worked in massive classical office buildings, and made polite conversation with preservation doyennes over sherry on colonnaded antebellum porches. I didn’t know yet that Butte constituted the state’s urban core; that Westside miniature mansions held pride of place in Helena’s strut to political and business success. I didn’t know what buildings and farmyards best served a late nineteenth century rancher. I’d been ready for an adventure, but hadn’t much scoped out the specifics. I had yet to learn what represented this state’s human past.
Over time, I began to notice how often lilacs had been made walls—secure and sturdy enough to edge lawns. I found a Hi-Line farmstead version: abandoned house, listing barn, and a fulsome series of work spaces and gardens defined entirely by high happy lilacs hedges. I saw that homeowners could turn them into gorgeous bonsai—all bare twisting artful limbs—or encourage their shaggy fullness. I came to understand that folks nurtured specific strains—the old, faded but powerful true lilac, an offsetting white, or deepest of purples. I figured out that deer nibbled on lilacs, loved their shade, would feast on new shoots but were unlikely to decimate established ones.
Just as I was an import, so were lilacs. They weren’t native to Montana or to the North American continent for that matter. They arrived in Europe, a gift from the Holy Roman Emperor to a Flemish botanist, at the end of the 16th century; and on to this continent two centuries later. As fictional Lidian remembered on her 90th birthday, nineteenth century women chose, at some incredible cost in energy and precious space, to bring lilac shoots west–to pack spring with them. And the lilacs they carried loved it here, drawn to our rocky soil, utterly at home and especially convivial partners to our long winters, able to position themselves biologically to burst into bloom at the edge of our frost season.
We rightly fuss over our truly wild flower children, the mountain meadow rainbows of bear grass, Indian paintbrush, snowberry, glacier lilies, blue camas, yellow bells. We mark biological diversity by their health and presence. We fight against their loss to ill-planned hiking trails and hungry drill rigs. The native flowers often live in places we work harder to reach and so they delight us that much more. Extravagant color in forbidding spots. Wildflowers may not be documented for publication as often as bison calves and mountain/cloud dioramas, but they still command great red-carpet, glossy photograph space.
I’d grant the same to lilacs and the other, though perhaps less persistent and exuberant, domesticated beauties. Humans haven’t had the luxury of luxury here very often. In our short-summer seasoned land, a long way from the millions of folks with whom we might trade, we work. We do what needs to be done. We build what we can, and what we need, focused on economies of time and means. Much of what we construct disappears fast when we aren’t using it. Much of what I’d come to Montana to preserve was functional rather than fancy. Most important of all, the landscape itself—as with our wildflowers—served Montana’s first peoples as shrines, landmarks, homes.
Historically, farmstead gardening meant potatoes and onions, rutabagas and carrots. With a little spare time and reachable water, homemakers sometimes spaded up a corner for tulip bulbs or edged a walkway with zinnias. But a lilac bush, in the right spot, needed still less attention to offer its spring reward. So, however minimal, we established and treasured the loveliness that could survive here. Simple, sturdy, self-reliant lilacs very much included.
Our gardens have changed now. Hybrids, even my elusive Kansas forsythia, offer choices in species once unknown and unlikely. We’ve seized on Russian sage with uncommon fervor. Vegetable gardens have morphed from necessities into environmental and social choices. Flower beds trend away from flat linear plots into curvaceous, hummocky settings for rocks and ornamental grass. Lilacs haven’t disappeared in newly landscaped lots, but they appear less often.
Just as Montana’s corrals and canals, our mining remnants, stony vision quest perches, fire lookout towers and one-room schools from past eras grow more precious as they grow more scarce, I find the same to be true of lilacs. Come late May, I will drive Helena streets again to spot the lush survivors and remember that first summer and the introduction to Montana and her story that lilacs provided. I do not miss the fancy plantation houses or government temples of the East Coast. I am, instead, at home in the sturdy landscapes of my longest home. ©
