The Lupine are Blooming!

One of Marie’s earlier works was a Lupine bloom. She admired the plant for its use by many cultures over the millennium as a food source. The legume seeds of lupins, commonly called lupin beans, were popular with the Romans, who cultivated the plants throughout the Roman Empire where the lupin is still known in extant Romance languages by names such as lupini.
Seeds of various species of lupins have been used as a food for over 3000 years around the Mediterranean and for as long as 6000 years in the Andes. Lupins were also used by many Native American peoples such as the Yavapai in North America. The Andean lupin was a widespread food in the Incan Empire and the pearl lupin of the Andean highlands of South America, Lupinus mutabilis, known locally as tarwi or chocho, was extensively cultivated.
Like other legumes, they can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into ammonia via a rhizobium–root nodule symbiosis, fertilizing the soil for other plants. This adaptation allows lupines to be tolerant of infertile soils and capable of pioneering change in barren and poor-quality soils. Because of this trait Lupine were planted at Chernobyl to help cleanse the soil of radioactivity.

We gave out packets of Lupine seed at Marie’s service and later took the remaining seeds up to the Marin Watershed and cast them to the wind. Now, several years later, the Lupine on the watershed have spread far and wide and are blooming on every sun facing hillside! Every spring since we spread the seeds there are more and more blooms. We want to thank Rod Milstead @rpmteacher for taking these beautiful pictures of Marie’s Lupine at Bon Tempe Lake. Visit our website to learn what Tentacles & Wings has been doing lately!