by Elizabeth Spence
How do you spell it? Lupin or lupine with an “e”? It depends where you come from, the UK or North America, but both are considered correct. Since I’m a Brit, I’m going to use “lupin.” We’re all for cultural diversity here.
Not that it really matters what it’s called or how it’s spelled when you consider that “a rose (and indeed a lupin) by any other name would smell as sweet.” Romeo and Juliet.
Whichever spelling you use, the Latin root of the word, “lupine,” remains the same and means: “wolf-like!”
Wolf and lupin tattoo
What have wolves got to do with it? Ultimately no-one really knows, but there are all sorts of old theories:
- Lupins are greedy plants, they say, and “wolf down” the minerals in the soil. The use of the verb “to wolf” in this sense wasn’t used until 1861, but earlier botanists speculated that lupines were rapacious plants, like wolves of the plant world, and gobbled up all the nutrients in the soil;
Lupins, like everything in the pea family (yes, it’s a pea!) are nitrogen-fixers and they can survive in poor soils where many other plants can’t, so it looked as though lupins were robbing the soil.
The truth is, they just don’t need good soil to thrive because they look after themselves to a great extent. It was common practice in some countries from ancient times until the introduction of synthetic fertilizers for farmers to grow lupins and then plough them in to improve the sandy soils;
- In meadows, the flower stems of the white lupin, probably the oldest type of all, looked like the tails of wolves running through the grasses;
- Lupins and wolves are sheep-killers. Lupins do contain alkaloids that are toxic to grazing animals (and to humans, I might add.)
- The flowers (of the white lupins) look like a wolf’s teeth..
- The new buds looked like a wolf’s paws. In Welsh the lupin is wolf’s fingers.
- An Old German and Old English word for the lupin is “wolf bean”, not to be confused with “wolfsbane,” which is Aconitum or Monk’s Hood and also highly poisonous. Has anyone ever heard of the lupin being called “wolf bean”? Please let us know!
- In ancient lore, if you drink lupin juice during a full moon, you will turn into a werewolf. Remember Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter books? He turns into one!
As far as we know, the first known mention of the word “lupin” appeared in AD77 in a Latin book by Pliny the Elder called The Natural History, but he doesn’t explain the origin of the word.
The work was largely based on Greek sources, and this is all a bit odd, because the ancient Greek word for “lupin” was “thermos” which means “hot!”
Various First Peoples in the Pacific Northwest had some interesting names for the plant:
kukuxmatʔaqtł – “rattling sound inside”
nantł’iłi t’una – “bee plant”
qw iqw iqeníłml’x – “blue/green topped (low) bush”
weswásxnqn – “long head”
These names have nothing whatever to do with wolves, but are fascinatingly descriptive nonetheless.
So, we’ll leave the history of the word “lupin” here, knowing that we will never uncover what the wolf connection really is. Here is one of George’s gorgeous lupin photos:
The classification of lupins is a rat’s nest of confusion, and there are suggestions that we have between 200 and 500 different types. Work in progress, I suppose.
Archeological evidence shows that the white lupins (Lupinus albus) were around at least 4,000 years ago in the Eastern Mediterranean and 2,500 years ago along the Andes in South America.
It was grown for the seed, or bean, and was used in cosmetics and medicine. In fact, in ancient Greece they used ground-up lupin seeds to improve the skin on their faces, and you can still get it on Amazon, although these days it is sold as an edible keto-friendly alternative to wheat flour.
In traditional medicine, white lupin had all sorts of uses: a cure for worms, boils and skin problems, and, more recently, ostensibly, to control blood sugar in diabetics.
It was also used as human food and animal fodder in spite of the toxicity. The alkaloids in white lupins are water-soluble, so a good soaking in water or brine gets rid of most of the poison. (Interestingly, extracted alkaloids from lupins have recently been tested as an insecticide). (Equally interestingly, caffeine is an alkaloid).
Lupins fall into two general groups, “bitter” and “sweet.” “Bitter” means high alkaloid content, “sweet” means low alkaloid content – less than 0.02% – that is to say, much less toxic to humans and animals.
The sweet forms of white lupine with their low alkaloid concentrations were first developed in the 1930s in Germany, and since then, all sorts of food products have been more easily made from the seeds. You don’t have to go through the soaking process any more, and pets and livestock won’t get desperately ill by eating them, and neither will we.
You can get the seeds to grow the edible ones on Etsy, (although I wouldn’t want to risk growing my own). An example of what’s available commercially these days in the food line is pickled lupin seeds – “lupini beans” – generally eaten as a snack.
Three years ago, the CBC reported that researchers in PEI are test-growing white lupin for food since the growing conditions there are quite favourable. I wonder if there has been progress there. Anyone know?
The lupin seeds that we buy in packets these days are usually called “garden” lupins or “Russell” lupins, named after a British gardener and nurseryman, George Russell (1857-1951), who spent most of his life refining their appearance.
He was interested in developing ones that had denser flowers and had colours other than the usual blue or purple. He showed his work publicly in 1937. Thanks to Russell and subsequent breeders, we now have a great variety of shades: red, orange, coral, light blue, yellow and pink, etc. There are many bi-colours as well.
In spring, we are blessed in our province with the sight of lupins flowering everywhere – in fields and ditches as well as in our gardens. It is a reason for visiting Nova Scotia at this time of year. Quite magnificent. George captured this image of wild lupins:
Yet the lupins we see are not native to Nova Scotia, even though they are considered an iconic East Coast flower. The type we find here is Lupinus polyphyllus, or big-leaved lupin, and it is originally from the North American Pacific West.
There was a native lupin here, Lupinus perennis, but it hasn’t been seen in the wild for some time. It has smaller leaves and likes drier conditions than the lupins we see everywhere which are, originally, garden escapes.
In our “Garden Neighbour” article on Gwen Locke, we reported that Gwen’s four-times great grandfather, John Wilson, was a nurseryman who came over from Scotland to New Annan in 1817 and worked with plants until his death in 1864. He brought a lot of plants and seeds with him, and his wife, who stayed behind in Scotland for ten years, regularly sent him more of them as well.
The family story is that he introduced the big-leaf lupin to Nova Scotia, and that could indeed be possible, since lupin seeds were first taken to Britain from western North America in the 1820s by another Scot, the botanist David Douglas (b. 1799). (Heard of the Douglas fir?). Or John could possibly have sourced them from western Canada.
Whatever the case, big-leaved lupins are now everywhere and they are officially classed as an invasive species. The government’s advice is not to grow lupins at all in our gardens for fear they will escape via their seeds and further destroy the existing environmental biodiversity.
I won’t go into the problems that arise when a plant is classed as “invasive.” Suffice it to say that the Nature Conservancy of Canada observes: “unfortunately they are so common now it would be unfeasible to try and eradicate them.”
In contrast, the Nova Scotia Lupin Society was formed in 2018 “in an effort to spread appreciation of the lupin and to lobby the Government of Nova Scotia to recognize the lupin as the official weed of Nova Scotia.” The society promotes growing lupins to make the world a more beautiful place.
I wonder who’s going to win? The lupin, I suspect.
This all brings up that thorny question as well: “What is a weed?”
Lupins are among the easiest flowers to grow in the garden, and they flourish just about anywhere, as long as the soil is not too soggy or too clay-ey. Nowadays there are dwarf ones and giant ones and in-between ones.
There are annual lupins that just last for the one season and then die, and there are perennial ones that last about five years, and they don’t need much attention at all. It’s good to check on a seed packet to see if your seeds are annual or perennial, just so you know, although lupins can be a bit fickle when it comes to how long they live.
For garden purposes, Jennifer soaks the seeds for four hours to soften the seed coat, then sows them. They germinate for her in about seven days.
I just scatter them in the autumn more or less where I want them to grow, and they then magically appear in the spring. I thin as required.
You could also use the method described by Jennifer in her article on winter sowing. This is a more organized version of my scatter approach and is much, much easier than starting them inside.
In general then, lupin seeds require some sort of preparation before they will germinate because they have a really hard outer coat and water needs to get inside and soften everything ready for germination. Some things you can do are:
- soak them (Jen.)
- give them a cold period (called stratification) (Eliz.)
- scarify them which means
- rubbing with sandpaper,
- nicking with a knife, or
- taking a bit of the shell off with nail-clippers
Once they are growing, the only things I do with mine is put a three-foot stake in to tie the flowers to as they grow since the flower spikes get quite heavy and they are in quite a windy position in my garden; spread a layer of compost around them after growth has started in the spring and then mulch well with wood chips. That’s it.
When flowering is over, I remove the faded flowers unless I want to keep some seed, in which case, I will leave one or two stalks and collect the seeds when they are ripe.
Sometimes, if I haven’t been quick enough at dead-heading, I find the lupins have done all the work themselves and the offspring have just popped up in the garden bed or in the gravel paths.
If I want them, I transplant them when still young. Because of their long tap-roots, lupins don’t like being moved when they’re all grown up. They sulk terribly, so it’s best to do it when they are quite small.
Quite often the new plants don’t “come true,” which means that you don’t always get the same colour flower in the offspring. It can be an exciting game waiting to see what you are going to get.
This is a result of hybridization: there are so many different parents and grandparents. The tendency though is for the flowers eventually to revert to the original blue or purple over the generations.
I used to cut everything back, including the lupins, before winter hit – I “put the garden to bed” – but now I don’t bother, so once I have collected the seeds, I don’t have to think about the lupins again until spring. What more could you ask of a plant?
The good old lupin is such a fabulous and familiar garden plant, so easy, so stunning and so impressive and it has such a fascinating history to think about. It’s a pity it doesn’t flower all year, but then again, we do have George’s lovely pictures like this one to look at through the winter.
Or you could watch Dennis Moore the highwayman:
June, 2025
Copyright©2025 Elizabeth Spence
2 Responses
I have been teasing a friend in Ontario who is proud of his lupins by sending him pictures of the common ditch lupins around here that are not found in Ontario.
Good old Nova Scotia!!!