Olfactory Art Keller is honored to present Bloom Dates, a solo exhibition of recent work by multimedia artist Miriam Songster in the gallery’s Project Room. The exhibit is centered on the fragrance of freshly cut lilacs from Songster’s own garden in Pound Ridge and from neighboring Westchester gardens, with the lilacs displayed in glass vases with etchings by the artist. The Project Room will be infused with the evanescent fragrance of lilacs throughout the exhibition, or until the lilac season comes to an end, at which point the flowers will be allowed to wilt in place.

The lilac bloom start and end dates in the New York area and in much of the United States have shifted dramatically earlier in the last few decades, while in some areas lilacs now bloom later than they used to. This is due to climate change. As reported by the EPA “Because of their close connection with climate, the timing of phenological (i.e. the timing of a periodic biological phenomenon in relation to climatic conditions)  events can be used as an indicator of the sensitivity of ecological processes to climate change. Two particularly useful indicators of the timing of spring events are the first leaf dates and the first bloom dates of lilacs and honeysuckles, which have an easily monitored flowering season, a relatively high survival rate, and a large geographic distribution.”

These climate change-induced shifts are dramatically visualized in a map of the differences in lilac bloom dates between the 1950s and 2010s. This bloom-date map (Schwartz M.D., 2021) summarizes 70 years of data collected by weather stations across the contiguous 48 states to convey the precarious situation of lilacs and the ecosystems they are part of. Songster engraved the map on some of the vases holding lilacs in the Project Room, but she not only spreads data about the human impact on the natural world, she, like many other gardeners and community scientists, also contributes data from her own garden to the data sharing project www.budburst.org.

Bloom Dates allows us to immerse ourselves into an entire blooming season of New York-area lilacs and invites us to contemplate the connection between the fragrant fleetingness of the lilac’s bloom season and the precarity brought by climate change. The exuberance of spring courts thoughts of death.