Lovely Lilacs: A Giveaway (Closed)

Oh joy! My lilacs are in bloom and the scent is heavenly. My shrubs are FULL of blooms this year. We had a tough winter here so I worried that the lilacs wouldn't be at their best but they absolutely are.

I have four common lilac shrubs planted in a row and, really, there's nothing common about them! I am always amazed that there are so many shades of purple and pink in their blooms.  Really gorgeous. They are planted at the side of the house that doesn't have any windows so I need to go outside to see them. Their scent reaches our back door though and provides a strong incentive to walk around the side of the house and visit them often.

They were planted almost fourteen years ago now and have grown to be so tall and majestic. Their habit of sending up suckers in surrounding flower beds is a little annoying but a small penalty to pay to enjoy their beauty.

In honour of my lovely lilacs, I am giving away a pair of my lilac cards (one each of my Lilacs and Lilac Sprig images). All you have to do is leave a comment below and I will choose one winner here on June 1st (noon EDT). Because the lilacs' scent has gone to my head, I'm also giving away pairs on Instagram and Facebook. So you can increase your chances of winning by commenting there too.

Giveaway results (June 1, 2014):

I think it is so nice that the random number generator I used for my giveaway happened to pick locations around the world. :)

Blog winner: Jessica in the United States

Facebook winner: Maribel in Spain

Instagram winner: Sharon in Australia

Thank you to everyone who entered. Thanks especially for your lovely comments. Here's to lilac love!

If my hand looks a little awkward in this photo, it's because I took the photo with my iPad.
I had my iPad steadied on my outstretched arm. Artist and acrobat.

 ❤  ❤  ❤

In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash'd palings,

Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,

With every leaf a miracle - and from this bush in the dooryard,

With delicate-color'd blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

A sprig with its flower I break.

From Walt Whitman's 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d' (Leaves of Grass)

The Flowers of May

Along with getting my garden on its feet (that's an odd idiom), I have succeeded in painting a little the past week. I get so torn this time of year. Garden? Paint? Garden? Paint? Some of the spring flowers are so fleeting that they need to be painted or else I have to wait for next year. But my garden can run away on me (those feet again) if I don't get it under control at the beginning of the season.

Our back lawn is covered with wood violets right now. They are so pretty and I much prefer them to the dandelions which are also vying for my attention right now. I dug out a little clump of the violets and potted them so I would have to time to paint them. I am not a quick painter. I never have been. Too detail-oriented for that I guess. Below is my painting in progress and at the very top is my finished wood violet study on Twinrocker hot-pressed watercolor paper.

The paper wasn't completely flat when I finished the painting so I placed it under a pile of big art books. I really didn't pay attention to them at the time. They were serving a utilitarian rather than literary purpose. It was only when I retrieved my painting afterwards that I noticed the top book "The Flowers of May" with a watercolour painting of violets on its cover! I had distractedly chosen the perfect paperweight!

While it would be easy to assume that "The Flowers of May" is a celebration of this month's flowers, it actually pays tribute to a wonderful botanical artist named Caroline May who lived from 1809 until 1874. She painted delicate, beautiful watercolours of British wildflowers. About a thousand paintings of her paintings have survived. This book contains reproductions of ninety of them. I hadn't looked inside this book in years.  Look at Caroline May's painting of wood violets that she refers to as 'Dog's Violet'. Isn't it lovely? I'm so glad I saw it after and not before I had completed my own painting. It was a beautiful moment of serendipity in my week.

Within the same lovely purple palette, my lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) are in full bloom right now. I adore their fragrance and can't resist burying my nose in them each time I pass. You do have to be careful though. Yesterday my nose came very close to a giant bumble bee!

I am very fond of purple, especially blue-purple. My favourite colour is periwinkle (which is somewhere in between purple and blue). The lilac blooms have wonderful combinations of purple, blue and hints of pink. It's just amazing the gradation of colour in each little blossom. With their scent and colour, they are pretty close to a perfect flower for me.

I picked a small lilac sprig to paint. I actually had to pick more than one over the course of finishing my painting as lilacs wilt very quickly.

Here is my lilac sprig painting also painted on Twinrocker paper. The lilac in the photo is not the one I used as my reference for my painting but it's very similar. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a 'click and sniff' button so I could share their sweet, heady fragrance with you? ♥