today's entry ·
Lupinus polyphyllus
— the bigleaf lupine, sometimes called garden lupine or blue-pea
Lupine grows the way a memory does — first one stalk in the ditch by the road, then a hundred, then a slow slope of them under the powerlines, and you cannot remember ever not seeing them. by the time you notice they are everywhere, they have already been everywhere for a month.
the genus name comes from lupus, wolf — a slander, really, inherited from a roman idea that the plant devoured the soil. it does the opposite. nodules on its root cuff pull nitrogen out of the air and quietly hand it to the ground. a field of lupine is a field rebuilding itself.
“the wolves do not eat the field; the wolves feed it.”
the spike — the part you stop the car for — is not one flower but a raceme: dozens of pea-shaped blossoms spiraling up a stem, each opening from the bottom rung first. by july the lower rungs are already pods, dry and black-seamed, while the top is still violet. one plant is its own calendar.
for today's reader: walk a roadside, not a garden. lupine is a colonizer, a verge-dweller; she prefers the disturbed edge to the manicured bed. find one where no one planted it. tip a single floret upward — the keel will spring open like a small jaw. that is for a bumblebee, heavy enough to trip the latch. you are not heavy enough. close it gently and walk on.