The olive family
Oleaceae is a family of shrubs and trees rather than border plants, and everything a florist takes from it comes off a branch. Lilac, forsythia, jasmine and olive all belong to it, along with the ash trees and the privet in half the hedges in the country. It is a small family by species count and a disproportionately useful one.
about 25 genera
roughly 600 species
Temperate and tropical regions worldwide, with a strong Mediterranean and east Asian presence
Everything in this guide that belongs to Oleaceae
The family is easy to recognize once you know what to look for. The leaves come in opposite pairs, one either side of the stem at the same height, and the flowers are built in fours: four petals fused into a short tube that flares open at the mouth.
Inside there are only two stamens, which is unusual and is the real giveaway. Most flowers of this size carry five or more. Look into a lilac floret or a jasmine flower and there are only ever the two, set against the wall of the tube.
Individual flowers are small in every member, so the family works by massing them. A single lilac panicle can hold several hundred florets, and forsythia lines an entire bare stem with them before a leaf appears. What you are selling is never one flower, it is the crowd.
These are cut from wood, and woody stems take up water far less readily than soft ones. That is the whole reason lilac has such a poor reputation in the vase. Three to six days is the honest range and plenty of florists get less.
Most of that loss is avoidable, and it comes down to leaves. A cut lilac stem carries a great deal of foliage, and the foliage competes with the flower for whatever water the stem can pull up. Strip the leaves off almost completely, cut the base at a sharp angle with a clean blade, and get it straight into deep water. A stripped stem will outlast a leafy one by days, and it is the single most useful thing you can do with lilac.
Do not crush or hammer the ends. That was standard advice for decades and it is actively harmful, because smashed wood rots and blocks the vessels the water has to travel through. A fresh clean cut every couple of days does far more good.
This family carries two of the finest flower scents there are. Lilac is the one everybody knows, and it is notoriously hard to capture, which is why nearly every lilac perfume is a reconstruction rather than an extract. Jasmine is the other, one of the most valuable materials in perfumery, picked before dawn because the scent falls away once the sun is on it.
Jasmine flowers themselves are brief, two to four days at most. The foliage keeps going far longer, which is worth knowing when a customer wants the plant rather than the bloom.
Olive is the family's quiet workhorse. It carries no flower worth selling and lasts two to four weeks as cut foliage, holding its gray green color without wilting and drying well afterward. For anybody building a Mediterranean look it does more work than anything else on the bench.
Olive oil comes from this family, and so do table olives, which puts Oleaceae among the oldest cultivated plants of the Mediterranean. Ash is here too, the timber used for tool handles and bentwood furniture because it bends without splintering.
Privet is the least loved member and the reason so many people know the smell of this family in June without being able to name it. Its berries are toxic, which is worth remembering in a garden with children.
Forsythia earns its place for what it does rather than what it is. Cut in bud on bare wood in late winter and brought into a warm room, it will flower within a week or two, well ahead of anything outside. That is the same forcing trick used on cherry blossom, and forsythia is the most reliable subject for it.
