In downtown St. John’s, NL, motorists have been treated to a rare botanical sight this summer: a plume of pink lupins growing in the heart of a hectic intersection.
Dense swirls of purple, pink and white are not uncommon along the roadsides of Atlantic Canada when lupins come into bloom, but most of those fields are dominated by purple – and after a few summers the color seems to take over completely.
The careful pink cluster in St. John’s gardens, tended by retired neurosurgeon William Pryse-Phillips, may also succumb to purple over the years, the 86-year-old acknowledged in a recent interview. “Even though I may not live to see it,” he added, laughing.
The type of lupine that spreads across fields and takes over roadside slopes every year is the bigleaf lupine, and they are considered invasive, says Jason McCallum, a scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
They arrived in Atlantic Canada from western North America just as they arrived in the middle of St. John’s: Gardeners were captivated by their long, flowing clusters of pastel-colored flowers and decided to plant some seeds, McCallum said in a recent interview. The flowers are part of the pea family and eventually produce dozens of pods, each with its own row of seeds.
With so many seeds from just one flower, a small group of lupins can produce hundreds of seeds, which are then blown around by the wind. They hold on easily even in poor-quality dirt, which explains their abundance in the dry, dusty soil along highways, McCallum said.
“You start with a few plants, and before you know it, hundreds and hundreds of yards of the road are completely covered in lupines,” he said.
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About 30 years ago, the Prince Edward Island government tried unsuccessfully to eradicate the flowers, McCallum said.
“They went out with lawn mowers on the sides of tractors and tried to mow them in the ditches,” he said. “But they are perennials, they come back from their roots year after year once they get established. So even if you prevent flowering, the plants are still there.”
Now, lupine-covered fields and hills are an important part of the tourism equipment used to attract visitors to the region.
The sundial lupine, another species of the plant, is native to parts of Atlantic Canada, but “they are near threatened at this point,” McCallum said. Sundial lupins have the same foxtail-shaped flower heads, but their flowers are a pale, muted blue and the plants are smaller, he said.
Claire Ferguson of the New Brunswick Invasive Species Council said she encourages anyone interested in planting lupins to look for sundial lupine seeds, rather than the invasive bigleaf variety, even though they are not as colorful.
Invasive lupins can crowd out native plants and the insects that support those plants, although McCallum says they are a boon to bumblebees. And it’s the bumblebees, he thinks, that are at least partly responsible for turning multicolored lupine patches into fields of monochrome purple.
“Honey bees and butterflies and stuff, they like red colors more,” he said. “But bumblebees definitely like purple.”
The genetic component for the purple color in lupins is dominant, he said. Bees are more likely to land on purple flowers and pick up their pollen. If they land on a white or pink flower and cross-pollinate the colors, the flowers’ offspring have a much greater chance of turning purple.
Pryse-Phillips’ patch of pink lupins — what McCallum called a “founder population” — will likely be overrun with purple eventually, McCallum predicted, thanks to cross-pollination by bees that have browsed purple lupins and made a hole. stop in the pink side of the road.
Pryse-Phillips said he chose to plant the pink lupins this year because they were along with the other early summer flowers in his gardens in two medians at an intersection in St. John’s known as Rawlins Cross. About thirty years ago he became an official steward of the area in a city-run adopt-a-spot program, and his gardens are now cherished throughout the city.
After St. John’s spent much of early summer under a thick layer of fog this year, many of Pryse-Phillips’ flowers bloomed slowly. His pink lupins were among the first to burst through the ground; their flowers stood out all the more vividly against the gray June sky.
Although he likes pink, he says it is not a problem if they are replaced with purple in time. “They remain beautiful plants, regardless of color.”
© 2024 The Canadian Press
