Snow weighs down on the lilacs | Home & Garden

First, it was the lilacs and the freeze. Then it was the lilacs blooming too soon when temperatures soared in the 80’s. Now the flowers are draped in snow.

News10NBC talked with Mark Quinn who oversees the lilacs in Highland Park. He says probably around five to 10% of the shrubs saw some damage. It’s a good amount, but not enough to get him worried and certainly not enough to ruin this year’s Lilac Festival.

Quinn said, “There’s certainly going to be some work out there. Doing some clean up and some of the brushes have some broken branches. First thing, they didn’t look very good. I would say they looked pretty sad, all wilted and pushed to the ground. The weight of the snow had really brought them down to the ground this morning.”

If you take a drive around Highland Park, you will definitely see today’s snow hit some of the lilac brushes pretty hard.

Quinn said, “The snow weight had gotten onto this shrub and pulled it down so much that it snapped through here. This is probably one of the worst damaged shrubs I’ve seen.”

Quinn is the Superintendent of Horticulture for Monroe County. He knew his trip to Highland Park today would reveal some damage.

Quinn said, “There's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You know the best thing is just let time take its course and snow melt off of it and they'll bounce back up.”

And by mid-morning, many plants already had.

Quinn said, “And even the ones that did break. If you’ve got broken branches and you trim them back, they’ll come back in no time at all and even this one, once we get it pruned up, it’ll come back okay, but it has lost a significant amount of bloom for this year.”

The question still remains; will this spring’s flip flopping weather mean bad news in the long run?

Quinn said, “Actually the temperatures we're having this week are very beneficial from the perspective of the festival. It will hold them off a little bit. We weren't happy to see the snow, but the temperature, no problem at all.”

The flowers are at about 30 to 40% peak. Mark Quinn says the reason there was as much damage as there was is because there were leaves and flowers for the snow to hold on to and that extra weight was too much for some of those bushes to handle. Quinn says he will go around and trim off the areas that are broken and in all honestly, those areas will probably just grow back and be fine.  He says some of the branches that broke were rotted out and weak and should have been taken care of anyway. So the snow just kind of did the job for him.