West Coast gardeners cannot hobnob together for long without the question “How do you grow lupines?” cropping up.
Many want to know where they can get plants and seeds, yet nurserymen say there is no demand and carry little stock.
“They can’t be grown.” some gardeners tell me. “The seed won’t come up, and they can’t be transplanted.” They can be grown when you know your species and choose those adapted to your garden conditions.
Lupines are individualists. There are lupines for wet, acid soil, heavy and light soils, and dry, alkaline soil for locations with good drainage and bad drainage, mountain tops and regions below sea level, and foggy, desert, and sea coast areas.
There are almost 70 species of lupines native to California alone. There are lupines 1 inch high and lupines over 5′ feet tall.
They come in gorgeous blues and purples, deep and pale yellows, clear true pinks, crimson, lavender, and white. Someday, through crimson Lupines hirsutissimus, we may achieve a pure red lupine.
Notes on Care
For more than 20 years of field and garden work, I have been making notes on lupines as they grow wild and under cultivation.
It has taken many folders to house the notes of native lupines in their homes, but there is room to spare in the one folder on lupine culture.
My attempts at growing lupines have been a cross between cultivation and naturalization.
Although one well-known hybridizer, the late Major N. F. Vanderbilt, dug his old lupine plants, chopped them root and branch, and forked them into the soil where their descendants were to be grown.
I have had good results from bringing back a bucket of soil from the place where I obtained the lupine seed and scattering it in the part of the garden where the seed was sown.
All lupine seeds have hard shells, with some protecting themselves by armor. In the wild, some lupine seeds seem to lie in the ground for many years before they germinate. I have tried several methods of shocking lupine seeds into action.
One way is to soak the seed in warm water for from 12 to 24 hours. Another is to put the seed into a mason jar about half full of sharp gravel, shake it vigorously, and sow gravel and all.
Still, another method is to lay the seed on a board and scratch it by rubbing the seed with coarse sandpaper.
Sowing Seed
Do not fertilize wild lupines until the stimulation they can take is proven. In October, sow the seed shallowly and thinly where it is to grow. Try to keep the ground damp until the second leaves appear, and then ignore the plants.
You’ll soon have a colony. When I want to continue a clump, I cut the stems of the lupines after the first seed pods have exploded and lay them on the ground to do the rest of their popping. The seeds can’t blow so far away from the ground or rise so high.
As I live in the Fog Belt, I try to hold my lupine experiment down to species that prefer moist air, but in Southern California, I have had good luck with foothills and near-desert species.
When I want to save lupines for a location that isn’t ready for them, I sow a few seeds in gallon cans containing sandy soil.
There are drainage holes cut in the bottom and low on the sides of the cans. Then, I set the cans in the sun and keep them from drying out until the plants are a couple of inches high.
A 1-inch seedling may have a root 6″ inches long (one reason why nurserymen cannot handle the plants easily). My seedlings go into the ground when very young.
The bottom is cut out of the can, and the cylinder is lowered into a hole in the ground. Later, it can be pulled out, and the seedlings thinned.
Species Match Climate
Wherever you live on the West Coast, there is a species of lupines to match your climate and soil.
If you live close to the sea, there is creeping, silver-leaved L. littoralis, with bright yellow roots that run hither and yon in the sand and blue flowers as high as the golden-rayed bacteria they grow among and a little shorter than lemon yellow tidy-tips.
Fragrant L. variicolor crawls a little farther from the water on grass swards, where its prostrate stems with pale blue flowers wind their way among erect stalks of yellow viola.
If you want to grow these flowers together, give them a running start. Dig out a space 3 feet square and put in seeds or plants; the lupines and yellow violas will be able to hold their own when the grass has closed in on them.
The bush lupines give us some of the most spectacular coastal wildflower shows and are useful for holding banks. If you grow these, soak the seed and do not sow too deeply.
In New Zealand, hush lupines are used to keep dunes in place, as they were when San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park was in the making.
Central and northern coastal California have billows of the yellow form of L. arboreus, but on the lower end of Vancouver Island, the bushy mounds are taller and even more flower-laden.
Along the byroads, L. arboreus, in many colors, joins coastal sage, cobweb thistle, and purple wild iris.
The spikes that rise from the gray-leaved branches may be dull yellow, crimson, pink, or lavender, with large bowls of white morning glories roaming among the spears.
Along the road that follows the rocky coast south of Carmel, there rises on the left what Carmelites call the “Blue Mountain.”
For nine months of the year, it is silver with bushes of L. albifrons, but in the spring, it is overcast with a blue that is only a little grayer than the sea.
Some of the best native lupines grow on or near the desert. The stems of yard-tall blue L. magnificus are covered with white felt; the leaves are white with long hairs.
The fragrant lupine perfumes the air as richly as 6-inches purple L. odoratus, an annual lupine that grows with desert gilias and crimson Mimulus.
For Moist Spots
With moisture-loving lupines, the gardener will succeed best by treating them to a drying-off Period after the blooming period.
An easy lupine to grow in a wet spot is L. succulents, an annual species usually deep purple but maybe pure white or clear pink.
Two annual lupines of valley and slope are L. mums and L. densiflorus. Probably the best-known of West Coast lupines. L. nanus is as boundless in numbers as the Texas bluebonnet, which it resembles. L. densiflorus, with its varieties. Comes in many shades, with lilac the most common.
Some of northern California’s lower mountain slopes are buttercup yellow with L. albicaulis, but my two favorite lupines of this zone are annual L, stiversi, and velvety L. leucophyllus.
L. stiversi is a branching 1-foot plant with short flower heads of rose and light yellow; 2-foot L. leucophyllus is a determined individual with tan and wine-red flowers.
Because wild lupines of the West Coast know their minds and have worked things out for themselves, they are considered a wayward group. But they are not unmanageable when we learn to know their preferences.
The tall Russell lupines, in magnificent blues, crimson, pinks, yellows, and terracotta shades, are the result of the selection and hybridization of L. polyphyllus, which keeps company with veratrum and cow parsley in ilic-rich muck of bogs from north-central California up into British Columbia.
Twenty years ago, a lupine-loving Washington nurseryman working with L. polyphyllus, a 5-footer with leaves 12″ inches across, evolved some beautiful named varieties from the three best English strains. Harkins, Elliott and Downer.
His White Beauty was exquisite. In 1938, the seed of Russell Hybrids, which had won the Royal Horticultural Society medal in 1937, was introduced to American gardeners. These beauties were often 6 feet across, with flower spikes as tall.
Eight years ago, it was thought that a strain of Russell lupine had been developed for central and southern California, but the Russell lupine does not seem to be happy south of Oregon.
I do not know of a California nurseryman who now carries one. This hybrid is definitely for the Northwesterner; the more his climate resembles that of England, the better his success.
Although lupines are notoriously difficult to transplant, the Russells submit to it with better grace than the species. Large seedlings should be moved only when they are dormant.
Do not damage the nodules attached to the roots, for these contain the plants’ nitrogen supply. Do not add any nitrogen to the soil in which Russells are planted, although some phosphorus may be beneficial.
The soil should be deeply worked and well reinforced with manure and leaf mold. If, after the May and June flowering, the stalks are cut, you will have a second blooming in August. Seed can be sown outdoors in February or March or in the cold frame in October.
Two exotic lupines, L. hartwegi and L. luteus, both annuals, are sometimes found in West Coast gardens, but they cannot excel many of the native lupines in beauty.
I do not find either listed this year, but before the war, one of the California seed farms made a specialty of Mexican L. hartwegi in white, pink, and blue forms.
I have had success with these in light soil with good drainage, withholding water somewhat after the buds develop.
The white form is especially lovely on dewy mornings when its leaves and buds, shaggy with white hairs, hold the glistening drop.
Fodder Material
Some of the eastern seed firms used to carry the fragrant yellow-flowered L. luteus, a native of Morocco, Sicily, and Silesia. This lupine, grown in Europe for cattle fodder, makes fields of gold to be turned under by the plow.
Like the northern German farmers, the Italian farmers on the coast south of the Monterey Peninsula may have used it as a cover crop, for I used to find it in Indian kitchen middens.
I let it grow on my gravelly hillside for a time, but it disappeared. This year, however, I noticed it blooming close to pale blue L. variicolor and within hailing distance of silver mounds of L. albifrons.
44659 by Lester Rowntree