Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Each small tubular bloom spreads four lobes, yet only two {stamens} ride the inside of the throat on very short {filaments}, a pairing almost nothing else in a garden repeats. The simple untoothed blades sit two to a {node} in strict opposite pairs, on stems round in section that release no aromatic oil when bruised and carry no {stipules} at the leaf bases. The genus name is the Greek word for a hollow tube or pipe, a nod to the broad {pith} in young shoots that was once cleared out to make reed flutes. Its spent flowers ripen into a dry leathery brown pod 0.4 to 0.8 inch (1 to 2 cm) long that splits down two seams to shed flat winged seeds. The species epithet is the plain Latin word for common or ordinary, earned by how universally it was planted rather than by any want of quality. The deciduous leaves are broad and distinctly heart-shaped at the base with a perfectly smooth margin, 2 to 5 inches (5 to 13 cm) long. Wild populations cling to rocky hills of the southern Balkan Peninsula, in Serbia, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and neighbouring ground south of the Danube, and not to the western European or North American countryside where it merely escaped from gardens. In mid to late spring dense conical {panicles} 4 to 10 inches (10 to 25 cm) long open pale violet to mauve and throw a sweet, heavy perfume clear across a garden. It throws {suckers} freely from the base and from roots running underground, so one plant slowly becomes a many-stemmed thicket 8 to 15 feet (2.4 to 4.5 m) tall. A relative planted as a street tree carries creamy-white flowers a month later, on a much shorter tube, and smells musky and privet-like rather than sweet. Walt Whitman framed his 1865 elegy for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln around this shrub blooming in a farmhouse dooryard, it is the state flower of New Hampshire, and across North America a surviving clump still marks where a homestead once stood.

Accepted Answer

Syringa vulgaris

Name That Plant #037