snapped

As I mentioned last week, I’ve got some interesting photos to share from my trip to the annual Lilac Festival in Rochester, New York a few weekends ago. It was a beautiful day to visit the festival, but unfortunately, there weren’t many lilacs to enjoy.

We’ve had a weird spring in New York. March was unseasonably warm and sunny, so much so that many plants budded prematurely. April, however, was a different story (and May has followed April’s suit for the most part). Much colder, rainier, and windier. So much colder, in fact, that those plants, like the dozens of lilac bushes in Highland Park, that budded in March were damaged by the unexpected frosts of April. Those plants that managed to bloom only had a fraction of blooms that survived, and the rest of the plants never bloomed at all.

So when you see a wall of plants like this:

and know that, in a normal year, this wall should be covered with lilac blossoms, you get a sense of the scope of the damage that the bushes sustained.

Some of the plants did manage to blossom in part, but those blossoms were either thinner than usual or looked damaged:

Unfortunately, we didn’t see any of my favorite blooms, the deep dark purple “double lilacs,” but there were still a few valiant plants that were able to overcome the cold snap, and the trip was worth it just to see them nodding their heads in the breeze.

And luckily, the pansies took the weather fluctuations in stride and produced quite a show:

Let’s hope next Spring is a little kinder to the lilacs!