Loopy about lupins

Steven Desmond uncovers the touching story behind the exotic, multi-coloured field of lupins at Terwick in West Sussex

-  Steven Desmond

THE lupin is so cosily familiar as a feature of the early-summer flower border that it comes as a surprise to discover its dramatic history. We have become used to its pretty range of bicoloured flowers, easily grown from seed, and never think to express gratitude to the single-minded devotion that made such things possible. Like so many lovely things that we have come to take for granted, there is more to this than meets the eye.

We must first lift our hats to David Douglas, despatched to the west coast of North America in the 1820s. He was a hugely successful plant hunter who brought us many of our most familiar garden plants before his recklessness brought about his early death. One of his enduring legacies is Lupinus polyphyllus, a widespread species of shingly riversides from California to Alaska. Its chirpy blue and white flowers soon established themselves in Britain as garden favourites and the plant’s adaptable nature meant that, before long, the big seeds found themselves well suited to life on the other side of the wall.

This unplanned, but perhaps not unexpected, escape to the wild was such a ‘success’ (I tread carefully here) that, within 50 years, William Robinson was able to use the lupin as a model of his dubious intention to populate the countryside with foreign herbaceous perennials. When he wrote in The Wild Garden of ‘the perennial Lupine dyeing an islet with its purple in a Scotch river’, he revealed the plant seeking out the kind of habitat it had left behind thousands of miles away. It has done this around the world ever since, becoming a rather too familiar sight along the braided rivers of New Zealand, for instance.