Syringa vulgaris is a plant of British gardens rather than a hothouse subject: hardy, indifferent to aspect, and grown for a fortnight of heavy scent in late spring. Lilac takes it at that moment, when the trusses are fully open and the shrub is carrying more flower than leaf.
The difficulty with lilac as a subject is that a truss is not one flower but hundreds of small ones packed into a cone, and the design does not shirk it. Each panicle is built up from individual florets, so the density is real rather than suggested, and the mass has weight where a looser drawing would have gone thin. Surface printing makes this possible: the colour sits on the paper in a soft, slightly chalky layer that holds fine detail without hardening the edges.
It is a generous, old-fashioned wallpaper in the best sense, and it wants to be used generously. In a cottage bedroom it is entirely at home; in a town flat with plain joinery it reads as deliberate romanticism rather than as nostalgia. Either way it is better hung across a whole room than confined to a single wall. A large-scale companion exists as a two-roll set, for a wall that wants the same flower at picture scale.
