As far as I’m concerned, it’s been a gorgeous fall.

The trees put on a great color show and then dropped their leaves in showers of yellow, red, gold and orange.

Around here, they’re mostly yellow.

Some of the lilacs were a bit weird, though. They flowered or sent out some small leaves. It was just a few shrubs, but they shouldn’t be blooming in the fall.

This year’s wet weather created perfect conditions for a foliar fungus called Pseudocercospora. Lilacs around the state got hammered by this disease. The shrubs lost their leaves early and went into a dormant state. When moderate fall temperatures arrived, some of them flowered.

Bizarre.

To help the lilacs, all we can do at this point is rake and destroy the leaves as best we can. We can hope that next year will be drier, but that o

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