When I turned 12, my mother let me redecorate my bedroom. I think she hoped that if I had the canopy bed of my dreams, and chose paint and fabrics myself, I'd begin to make my bed and stop throwing my clothes on the floor so the dog could sleep on them. This was sort of like hoping your child will eat vegetables if she helps grow them herself. Wrong on both counts.

For my birthday, somebody gave me a boxed set of French Lilac bubble bath, cologne, and dusting powder. Though I had never actually seen a lilac growing (Bush? Bulb? Vine? Tree? Who knew?) the scent was seductively romantic, and the picture of the heavily textured pale purple flower truss on the box was just how I wanted my bedroom to look. I chose lilac paint and a lilac quilt. Accessories were confined to lavender and mauve. No pink. No purple. No green. No blue. No bright white. Just pale lilac. In my room it was always Lent, but never Easter. At dusk, it looked like a morgue. I now attribute my occasional crying jags that year not to incipient puberty, but rather to the color lilac. A year later when we moved, I painted my new bedroom walls Williamsburg gold.

Though their color was hard to live with on its own, even at 12, I sensed that lilacs had something to do with romance and youth, and the giddiness that it is all beginning to happen to you, and it is your turn, and nobody can stop it, not even your mother. Lilacs are more a state of mind than a color or a bush. If you bury your nose in a cool purple bouquet of them and quiet your mind, you may be able to recall that heart-in-your-throat feeling that at any moment you could, you probably would, fall in love.

Lilac blossoms are as ephemeral as youth. The buds spend 6 weeks fattening up, but when they open into large flower trusses in May, you'd better enjoy them PDQ, because in a week or 2 they will be brown. Youth may be wasted on the young, but lilacs are too precious to not enjoy, admire, pick, smell, and generally revel in as long as they are around. If you do lilacs right, two weeks of them is long enough, and you will be ready to move on, without regret, to something else.

If you already have a lilac or 2, you are probably aware of their drawbacks. Some don't bloom until they are 10 years old. (Buy lilacs in bloom so you know they are old enough, and you can see and smell the blossoms.) Their leaves are either boring or mildewed. If their flowers are not removed after they fade and turn brown, they hang on all summer looking as if they are dead, which they are. Though lilacs can live for 75 years or so all by themselves out in some field where there used to be a farm house, your lilacs and mine sometimes get borers, which causes whole branches to die. These have to be cut out. Lilacs also have an irritating tendency to bloom way up at the top where you can't reach the flowers.

This is why breeders have been fooling around with lilacs for more than a century. Now there are over 1600 cultivars in the genus Syringa, which should be enough. There are compact ones, early and late blooming varieties, disease resistant types, and one that reliably reblooms throughout the summer, though with smaller, tighter, less fragrant flowers. This dainty Little Leaf Lilac, Syringa microphylla 'Superba,' is one of my favorite shrubs for flower arrangements.

Still, lilacs continue to be introduced at a steady pace, and from unlikely places. Don't be alarmed by lilacs with Russian names, such as Krasavitsa Moskvy (Beauty of Moscow) which, when it was introduced in 1947, was understandably unappreciated, McCarthyism being what it was. Well, the Cold War is over, and even if it wasn't, I would still buy Beauty on the enthusiastic advice of the author of the invaluable text, Plants that Merit Attention, Shrubs vol. 2. The hauntingly beautiful illustration of 'Krasavitsa Moskvy' more than justifies the authors' recommendation.

Lilacs are notorious for wilting almost immediately after being cut and put in water. You can make them last for a couple of days by slicing the woody stem up an inch or so, stripping away all the leaves, and putting the stems in fairly hot tap water right up to the base of the flower heads. A wine carafe works wonderfully for this. When the water cools, arrange the lilac stems in a vase of water and keep the water topped up. My mother discovered that purple lilacs dry well, if you can bear to cut them at their peak and hang them upside down in a warm dark place. Purple lilacs colors deepen as they dry and last for a couple of years.

Lilacs now come in violet, lavender, cream, white, pink, blue violet, bi-color magenta and white, pale yellow, and even peach. If I were to have a lilac colored bedroom now, it would look like a pastel rainbow.