The remarkable foliage of Weston Nurseries’ Spring Rainbow Lilac creates a unique, reliable beacon of color that alerts viewers that lilac-blooming-time is about to begin! Warming April temperatures coax its distinctive bronze, yellow, orange, and pink leaves to expand, creating an amazingly-bright color splash in the garden for several weeks every spring.
As its flower panicles start to appear a few weeks later, its species-typical single blue-violet flowers form a colorful contrast with the foliage until full bloom, when the kaleidoscope foliage relaxes to “normal” green by the end of blooming and for the rest of the summer.
It was Mike Maneri, our Weston Nurseries field supervisor in the 1980’s, who first spotted this unique lilac cultivar, a chance seedling, growing among a population of several hundred common lilac (Syringa vulgaris) seedlings we’d propagated and planted in our nursery field. Then only about three feet tall, it was a distinct oddity in the field, a flare of color so early in the spring.
Initially we thought it might be showing herbicide damage but after we watched it for several years, we realized that it was healthy and that its unique new-growth coloration continued to be stable each year. We rooted a few cuttings in the 1990’s but never added it to our main propagation line.
It was only in 2017 that we contracted with Deb McCown’s tissue culture lab at Knight Hollow Nursery in Wisconsin to enable its introduction to a broader market.
Around 1999 we asked Roger Coggeshall and Evie King at their Syringa-Plus Nursery to try propagating it for us. They succeeded in producing some plants but were unable to initiate full production.
It is registered with the International Lilac Society, propagates well from cuttings, and is not patented, so it can be freely grown by anyone.
Weston Nurseries has a large selection of Weston’s Spring Rainbow Lilac in stock and ready to plant today!
