Free Lilac Shrubs from Offshoots (Suckers)
How to easily pot or mail them
Almost all common lilacs (the Syringa Series within the lilac genus Syringa) send up offshoot plants from their underground roots, familiarly known as suckers. A few littleleaf lilacs (the Pubescentes Series, like ‘Miss Kim’) send up offshoots, but the late and tree lilacs (Villosae and Ligustrina Series, like ‘Donald Wyman’ or ‘Ivory Silk’) rarely do. These offshoots are free lilac plants and can save you the usual cost of $20-$80 (plus shipping); some lilacs sell for hundreds of dollars.
The most desirable common lilacs are the ones with large leaves and large florets and flower panicles. These are the early-season S. ×hyacinthiflora and the mid-season S. vulgaris, almost all of them named cultivars that come in seven basic flower colors (white, violet, blue, lilac, pink, magenta, and purple), and even more and usually darker bud colors that give a nice contrast.
The offshoots can be found even before the mother plant blooms (which can take 3–5 years after planting a 1–2-foot shrub), and they can be inches to several feet away. These can be easily separated from the mother plant and coaxed into becoming a new, genetically identical shrub. The best time to do this is in spring.
The biggest problem is making sure the offshoot is really that, and not a new seedling that spontaneously sprouted from a mother plant seed; these seedlings are not genetically identical and 99.9% of the time are an inferior plant. To make sure of this, dig the dirt around the sucker to expose the root connecting the offshoot to the mother plant. If there’s no connection, it’s an undesirable (for the home gardener) seedling.
Once you’re sure you’ve got a true offshoot, sever the main root connection to the mother plant leaving 3–4 inches of the main root attached to the offshoot. This root should be adorned with lots of small hair-like roots for it to have a chance of survival; the more, the better. You can use a sharp, flat-edged shovel, a garden knife, or a pruning shears to cut it. You don’t need to keep any soil.
Immediately put the offshoot in a pail of water, covering all its roots but not the leaves. Give it an hour (up to 24 hours) soaking before the next step.
If you want to plant it in the ground, you can, but I don’t recommend it; the hairy roots need more complete development and an increase in number to give the offshoot plant a better chance of survival in the ground.
Instead, pot it up by placing it in a 1-gallon (6-inch-wide and deep) plastic pot with drainage holes, 1/3 to half-filled with potting soil, and then cover the roots with more potting soil. The potting soil should have lots of sand and just a little sphagnum moss in it as lilacs like lots of drainage. Or mix your own by volume with 1/3 sand, 1/3 compost, and 1/3 potting soil, garden soil, or topsoil. Add some long-acting (NOT short-acting or rapid) fertilizer (5–10–5 works fine) to the top, tamp the soil lightly, and water thoroughly. Leave it in the shade for a week or two, keeping it moist but not wet, then gradually move it into a full sun exposure. Let it sit for 6–12 months, watering when dry, and then it can be planted in the ground (without the pot, of course). Established lilacs don’t need fertilizer, but they sometimes need the soil pH adjusted (they like neutral to alkaline soil) or nutrient deficiencies corrected for optimal growth and flowering. Soil tests can tell you this and are cheap and easily performed at home.
But what if you want to share your offshoot with some out-of-town friends? Or mail one home to yourself? Then you need to properly prepare it for mailing. It’s always best to mail plants on a Monday, so that there’s no weekend delay. Good packaging will keep the offshoot going well for 4–5 days.
Here’s the process:
Take your offshoot that’s soaking in water and wrap the entire root structure (the part that was underground) with 3–4 large paper towels. Then soak those in water and mold them over the roots, leaving them sopping wet.
Over the wet paper towel that’s covering the roots, wrap plastic wrap (the kind used for food) in several layers to make an airtight and watertight seal.
Place this plastic-wrapped root structure inside a plastic bag with a closure at the top. Mark the bag with the type and name of the plant.
Close the top of the bag with the lilac stem in a corner and wrap that corner around the stem with a plant tie, bread tie, or pipe cleaner.
Place the plant in an appropriate size mailing box. Use package tape to secure the wrapped and heavy plant base to the bottom or side of the box and fill the remaining empty box space around the leaves and roots with crumpled dry newspaper.
When the package arrives, it should be opened immediately, and the offshoots removed from the root wrappings and planted like the two potted plants above. The potted offshoot leaves should look as fresh as the day they were dug, and you will have a free and valuable lilac for planting the next year.
I am indebted to lilac collector Kelly Applegate who first showed me the success of this method.
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Dr. DeBard is the Registrar for the International Register and Checklist of Cultivar Names in the Genus Syringa L. (Oleaceae). He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the International Lilac Society, and lives in hardiness zone 6a in Columbus, Ohio, USA.
