In every garden certain flowers stand up and get noticed: it could be their extraordinary colour, their architectural shape, their striking foliage, their sheer size. But there’s one flower that has it all: the lupin.

It’s a much misunderstood, even maligned, flower. Take its name for example: lupin comes from the latin lupinus meaning wolf. It was believed that the flowers would run wild over the land and destroy it. In fact, the opposite is true: lupins, like many plants of the pea family, are actually very good for the soil. Their root systems shelter a beneficial bacterium that fixes nitrogen into the soil. Despite its name, lupins were recognized by many early farmers as a ‘green manure’ used for centuries to restore tired soil in overworked fields.

Lupin seeds are edible, but extremely bitter to the taste. Zeno, founder of the Stoic philosophy, famously compared himself to lupin seeds saying he was ‘less bitter when well-soaked with wine‘. The large, hard shelled lupin seeds are so tough that seeds from an arctic variety have been retrieved from northern permafrost and 10,000 year old specimens have been watered and actually germinated in the lab. Now that’s what I call a hardy perennial

Not all members of the pea family are created equal: the seeds, or peas, of the lupin have some legendary qualities. For the ancient Greeks, the seeds were believed to have a mildly intoxicating effect and supplicants to the Oracle of Empires would eat only lupin seeds for several days prior to their consultation, ensuring a suitably mystical experience.

All the traditional European lupins were annuals, and the first big turning point for our garden lupins came with the arrival of the seeds of a new perennial variety from North America in the early 17th century. Unfortunately, these were something of a disappointment producing small plants with few blooms. A century later the handsome, charming, and eccentric plant hunter David Douglas came to the rescue of the lupin. Douglas must have been quite a sight as he traveled throughout Canada in the early 1800’s collecting plant specimens. Packed with his modest belongings, he carried a complete suit of Royal Stuart tartan, not what you’d call a subdued pattern, and was known to don the full regalia whenever the mood struck him - much to the amusement of his native crew and local inhabitants.

Douglas located some excellent l. polyphyllus specimens and risked his life several times to bring these plants back to England. Once the canoe he was traveling in was caught in a whirlpool on the Fraser River and he was spun for almost two hours. He called his survival a miracle. When Douglas’ lupins flowered back in England they were a vast improvement on the earlier flowers: taller, stronger, and filled with blooms.

The next big change was when the lupin went global. Thanks to a quiet, dedicated plantsman, George Russell, who worked steadily for over fifty years to collect lupin seeds from around the world , we now have the spectacular Russell Hybrids. The breathtaking colours, bi-coloured blooms and sheer size of these plants made them the star of the Chelsea Flower Show in 1937.

Like a botanical Cinderella, it only took 300 years for the lupin to make it to the gardening ball. From maligned and despised to a celebrated star, you get the sense that the lupin was always there, waiting to be seen for what it truly is: an inherently generous flower that nourishes the soil wherever it grows and nourishes our spirits wherever we encounter them.


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