May, 1917 
15 
WHEN SYRINGAS TURN TO LILACS 
And the Mock Orange Takes Its Rightful 
PI ace as a Namesake of Ptolemy II 
GRACE TABOR 
One of the showiest of all is the so-called 
Chinese lilac, of rather loose growth and very 
large flower clusters 
mance or anything else associating him with 
it. Nevertheless, the sweet mock orange is 
entitled to no other name; and the lilac 
alone is a syringa. 
But this matter of names is as often as 
not confused to the verge of very chaos! 
For example, Philadelphus —the mock or¬ 
ange plant—was the thing originally called, 
and with good reason apparently, “Syrin¬ 
ga this name being derived supposedly 
from syrinx, meaning pipe or shepherd’s 
Of a delicate and very lovely lilac or 
mauve are the flowers of 8. puhes- 
cens, opening in late May 
W HEN is a syringa not a 
syringa ? W h e n it is a 
Philadelphus. 
When is a syringa, a syringa? 
When it is a lilac! 
There isn’t any sense in this, 
of course—or at least there 
wouldn’t be, if it were not true. 
Being true, it seems as if there 
must be; else how could it be ? 
I am glad to get the two 
clauses into apposition. I have 
always wanted to, but never had 
occasion to until now; and what 
a relief it is! For now, it seems 
to me, I may be able to 
straighten it all out. 
Half of the time, when one of 
the elect in garden craft talks 
about syringas, those who are as 
yet only candidates, so to speak, 
think he means the mock or¬ 
anges—those stimulatingly sweet 
old shrubs that someone named “after an 
ancient Egyptian king . . . for no obvious 
reason,” as the encylopedia intelligently 
observes. Ptolemy H, he was; son of the 
founder of the Graeco-Egyptian dynasty, I 
believe, who lived some two thousand and 
two hundred years ago, more or less—and 
had about as much to do with mock orange 
shrubs as the man in the moon! 
Among his intimates this chap’s name was 
Philadelphus; only professionally was he 
known as Ptolemy IL So the plant species 
was chrisitned Philadelphus —in a sort of 
dignified chumminess, one presumes—al¬ 
though there never is a bit of legend or ro¬ 
8. Pekinensis is one of the later 
blooming sorts, opening creamy clus¬ 
ters about mid-June 
pipe. The stems of these shrubs 
have a pith that is so easily re¬ 
moved that pipes were made 
from them. But after it was 
thus reasonably applied to the 
genus which, to avoid confusion, 
it may be as well for me to refer 
to as mock orange, no one could 
think of a generic name for the 
lilac. So they decided to trans¬ 
fer to it this name, and invent 
another for the plant which bore 
it in the first place 1 
Hence it is that we still refer 
to Philadelphus, in the common 
tongue, as “syringaand keep 
on calling lilacs, “lilacs.” And I 
suppose we shall continue to do 
so, world without end. 
Of the lilacs we all know that 
“the fragrance is very sweet”— 
usually. I do not think all are 
aware that there are lilacs almost 
scentless and therefore, to my mind, worth¬ 
less ; or that there is one other which has so 
strong an odor as to be unpleasant to some 
people. Also, we are all aware that their 
flowers are purple, white or lilac and some¬ 
times almost pink. 
Indeed, it wmuld seem that there is very 
little new information to be disseminated 
with regard to these shrubs; for who does 
not associate them with the oldest that we 
have here in America ? And what dooryard 
is there that hasn’t its clump? 
Yet, of course, it is true that the things 
we are the most familiar with are the things 
of which we. very often know the. least. So 
