May 4, 2006 © Janet Davis
There’s a much-loved children’s book
called Miss
Rumphius (Puffin,1985). Written and
illustrated by the late Barbara Cooney and first published by Viking 
in 1982, it won the American Book Award for its renowned Maine
author.
Miss Rumphius tells the story of a little girl named Alice who sits on her grandfather’s knee and tells him she wants to be just like him: to travel to far-away places and live in a house by the sea. Her grandfather says that isn’t enough: “You must do something to make the world more beautiful”.
Alice grows up to become Miss Rumphius, the librarian. She travels far and wide, climbs mountains, rides camels and buys a little house by the sea. But she’s worried because she hasn’t yet made the world a more beautiful place. Then one spring she spots “a large patch of blue and purple and rose-colored lupines” in flower on a hillside near her home where they’ve spread from plants in her own garden. Miss Rumphius becomes the Lupine Lady, spreading lupine seeds wherever she goes and, yes, making the world more beautiful.
Like Miss Rumphius, I adore lupines with
their bewitching blue and purple flower spires in late spring. At my cottage, I’m working on creating my own wild lupine meadow too. But at the rate my plants are growing, I’ll
be 
an old woman with
a cane by the time I’m ready to beautify the rest of the world. For lupines have very particular needs, both
in their germination and ongoing growth.
Growing Wild Lupines
Perennial wild lupine (Lupinus perennis) is native to eastern Canada and the eastern U.S. where large lupine meadows are a familiar sight in late spring-early summer in the Maritimes and New England. One of more than 300 lupine species worldwide, it’s the only known host food plant for the endangered Karner Blue butterfly. Preferring full sun and well-drained, sandy soil with a low pH (acidic), wild lupine grows naturally in sand prairies, open oak woodlands and grassy areas with granite-based soils. It will not tolerate clay soil, making it a challenge to grow in most gardens.
Nursery-grown lupines often fail because their long tap roots make potted plants notoriously difficult to transplant, so it’s preferable to grow your plants from seed. If I do the math on my own seed-to-plant success, I estimate it’s about a 10:1 ratio, so a large supply of seeds is needed. In Canada, Ontario Seed Company sells wild lupine seed by weight. With about 45 seeds per gram, you can buy a 25 gram packet (1100 seeds) for $7.30 Can. In the U.S. Earthly Goods offers a whole pound of wild lupine seed for $37.50 U.S. – and with that amount, you can surely make a good start on a meadow.
This spring, I sowed a handful of lupine seeds at my lakeside cottage, observing a ritual I’ve perfected over the past five years. First, I soak the large seeds overnight in water to soften them. Then I get down on my hands and knees and carefully press each seed just under the soil surface in what I call my “lupine mud”. It’s actually a patch of rich, damp, sandy soil behind the house that never dries out because it’s in part shade at the bottom of a hill, thus retaining the moisture that wild lupine seeds need to germinate. I’ve tried at various times of the year to germinate lupine seeds in situ, but their critical need for moisture immediately after germination has led me to separate my seed bed from the actual growing locations.
A month or so later, when the little plants have several leaves and a small root system, I’ll carefully scoop them up with a large spoon and transplant them into my dry, sunny hillside meadows where I water them regularly the first summer as they put down their tap roots. Those that survive the first winter seem indestructible and completely drought-tolerant thereafter. They may not bloom for two, three or four years, but they’re on their way, ever so slowly, to becoming a meadow.
We can’t all be like Miss Rumphius, travelling to far-off places and living in a house by the sea. But we can, in our own small way, make the world a more beautiful place.
Adapted from a column that appeared in the National Post