A love letter to lilacs and the joys of fleeting pleasure

I grew up with a lilac shrub right outside my bedroom window. Each May, when the breeze hit just right, the scent would trail through the screen.

And how nice that scent was. Light, tender, sweet, sunny, vegetal – even a bit indolic, sharing the same dirty base note found in jasmine and tuberose. The sillage bordered on overwhelming, particularly on humid days when the scent clung to the wet air. It was difficult to believe that such a potent fragrance could emerge from four-petaled florets no larger than the fingernail on my thumb, clustered together into cones of wild perfume.

I loved it. There was no better promise of the upcoming months of lakeside walks, dewy mornings in the garden, and twilights spent chasing fireflies to the soundtrack of peeping tree frogs.

The bloom was always brief, though, only lasting two weeks before making way for the next rounds of flowers – iris, yarrow, honeysuckle, coneflower – each tossing its own scent into the bouquet of summer.

Removed from their shrubs, lilac clippings didn’t last long inside my home, either. Cuttings in a vase lost their turgor, incapable of drawing up the water and nutrients that once kept them supple. Flowers pressed into clay browned at the edges. Petals dried on paper lost all but faint traces of their original scent as their essential oils faded.

Still, I kept attempting to capture the lilacs, especially their scent, unwilling to let two weeks of fragrance come and go after a year of anticipation. During the long flowerless gap between the chrysanthemums of late fall and skunk cabbages of early spring, I craved a scented reminder of life and joy and beauty in full swing.

Perfumers have long tried to capture the scent of lilacs, but it’s a challenging task. What makes lilacs’ smell so alluring is a combination of about 200 volatile compounds in the oils that form on the petals. These compounds, with unromantic names like
(E)-beta-ocimene and benzyl methyl ether, are delicate. They cannot withstand the high heat and steam of the distillation process that extracts essential oils from other flowers like rose or gardenia. The scent can be imitated through synthetic compounds, but those fail to grasp the petals’ richness. Fragrance houses from Guerlain to Givenchy have attempted lilac perfumes, but none stand up to a true flower.

Consequently, the best way to preserve the scent is through a technique called enfleurage. To create an enfleurage, a perfumer places petals, leaves, bark, or whole flowers into a solid layer of neutral fat, traditionally tallow or lard. The plant’s oils melt into the fat, infusing their scent into the base. The petals are replaced daily over the span of days or weeks, allowing the perfumer to introduce fresh oils to strengthen the scent. Then, the pomade can be used as a solid perfume, rubbed along the pulse points at the neck and wrist to diffuse with body heat.

I was set on developing a lilac enfleurage from my own shrub. I gathered a glass pan, unscented coconut oil, a pair of scissors, and my wicker basket, which I filled with about a hundred tiny florets each day. I smeared the oil in an even layer across the glass container and then positioned the florets one by one. They sank into the oil, slimy and slippery. I changed them every morning. 

After a fortnight of rotating petals, I scooped the oil into a mini Altoids tin and smoothed it over with a spatula. Overnight, it hardened into a slippery, yellowed balm.

And it did not smell good.

Somehow, the mixture had fermented. I was left with heaps of bready, coconutty lilac sludge, which I tried to pawn off onto my sister and friends. No takers. Then I gifted the Altoids compact to one unfortunate recipient, only for the sun-heated mixture to melt out of the tin all over her car. The odor lingered for weeks.

I had clung to the hope that I could bottle – or encase in an old tin – the newness and freshness and fullness of all the springs I had lived through with my beloved shrub. But all the coconut oil in the world could not suspend a fresh lilac in its mid-May state of florescence.

On the face of it, it may seem like my experiment was a failure. But I see it as a success, just not the one I had originally anticipated.

I did not capture the lilac’s scent, but the time I spent with the shrub became more important than the pomade I sought to produce. I spent all two weeks of the bloom outside fiddling with lilac twigs, gently brushing away bees vying for the same flowers. I learned the knobs on its branches and came to appreciate the ruby-throated hummingbirds that visited for nectar. Even though the flowers lasted just a handful of days, they attracted and supported other life. Only through my time plucking flowers did I come to recognize the extent of that support.

I still want to try enfleurage again. Not because I think I will discover the secret elixir, but because I want to connect with my shrub once more. 

If anything, lilac blossoms’ ephemerality makes them all the more enchanting. Not being able to preserve them year-round makes their brief bloom special, a do-not-miss event. And though I miss the flowers the majority of the year, there’s joy in the anticipation of seeing them again and experiencing their allure. So, between flowerings, I carry the lilac’s scent not in oils on my wrists but as memories in my mind and wonder in my heart.