Health & Fitness
A Monty Python Mystery ... Why the Fascination With Lupine?
Some plants like to move, others hate it — but then gardening isn't a nomadic art.
I am becoming obsessed over time, as a gardener, not just with where plants wind up and why, but how they earn their names as well as reputations. Shades of that side-splitting Monty Python sketch, I can’t help laughing as I point out this spring beauty in my garden: “Lu-u-u-u-u-u-pine.” It’s formal name is lupinus and it is a member of the legume family, hence the distinctive shape of the flowers (pink, white, purple, blue) clustered on tall, sturdy stalks. The leaves are large and in most cases palmate. A mature lupine has a bush-like shape, some 2 feet x 2 feet.
Some sources say the name comes from the latin for "wolf", since the Romans cultivated the seed pods for food---which supposedly was considered by some to be fit only for wolves. Sounds a bit suspicious to me since currently folks are working to develop new strains of so-called "sweet" lupine in Europe and elsewhere as a cash crop both for food and as a rotational crop to put nitrogen back in the soil. I wish them luck. Once established, which may take some doing, the garden varieties of lupine don’t seem to like to be moved.
As a gardener, I guess I shouldn't complain about plants like lamium and their wandering ways — given that here's a plant I love that more or less wants to stay put. I can get lupine to spread if I break off the drying seed heads and scatter them through the bed. Next season nature will take care of any "moving" on its own. Before long, tiny lupine are struggling to establish themselves everywhere.
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A lot of us can empathize — about the moving, that is. Traveling light has gotten a great deal tougher in an era when we have traded in covered wagons for u-haul-its and rent-a-storage complexes to hold all our stuff. But then ever since the human species stopped hunting and gathering, I guess that was bound to happen. At any rate, trying to "tame" and cultivate a food crop named after a wild predator is one of those ironic twists that makes gardens and gardening so much fun.
