Wild Lilac Mary, the heroine of The House on Harrigan’s Hill, watches a hawk soaring above the hillside filled with purple wild lilac. Large clumps of white, pink, and pale purple flowers rise every spring all over North America, but California is the center of its distribution. Wild lilac or Ceanothus, Greek for ‘spiny plant’, has a strong fragrance that wafts over bare hillsides, especially in 1910 Truckee, where the trees have long been chopped down. The leaves are arrange