it was springtime in the mountains

In the door-yard 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 door-yard,
With delicate-color'd blossoms, and heart-shaped leves of rich green,
A sprig, with its flower, I break...
      -- From Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Courtyard Bloom'd", 1865"

In pre-Wilder-Association photographs of the Wilder farm like this one, there don't appear to have been any lilacs remaining between the road and house. Is that a lilac or a snowball growing by the front door today? I can't tell from the renovation photos, but it would be interesting to know if any evidence of plantings was found when digging for the new foundation in the 1990s. Lilacs can live for two hundred years (or more!), so it would have been possible for lilacs from the time of the Wilders to still be living today. (There is at least one maple tree near the house that does date from that time.) When Rose visited Malone, she wrote to her father that "there are old lilac bushes in the yard." (RWL to AJW, 1932)

Springtime to Almanzo - or to Laura who was writing his story and Rose who had recently been there - meant that the lilacs and snowball bushes were in bloom (no snowball bushes appear in the manuscript), and that violets and buttercups were blossoming in the pastures. Mother Wilder could apparently see a lilac from her bedroom window to the south, and Almanzo walks "between the rows of lilac blossoms up the front path from the road and in at the front, parlor door." (FB manuscript, page 54)

Where have all the lilacs gone?
- posted by pioneergirl at 6:30 PM