Where are the Lupines?

The lupines are especially bountiful this year. And, because of our unseasonably warm spring, they’ve come on early. By late May, many were already in full bloom. So, is it possible? That the island’s mid-June Lupine Festival may in fact be lupine-less?

This isn't, of course, as dire a circumstance as some of the Maine apple growers find themselves in. In the southern part of the state, the reward for early unseasonable heat warming our winter bones is that one night’s subsequent punishing frost may have decimated as much as 90% of the apple orchards’ fruiting blossoms.

Still, it would be nice if the Festival could catch a break. For three years running, torrential rains forced all related activities into the high school gym. Photographers sought their shots through rain-pocked windshields. Many of the originally scheduled early June dates often preceded lupine bloom. In recent years, hoping for better odds with the weather and lupines at their peak, festival organizers nudged dates into mid-June that, this year anyway, may as well be September.

Though disappointing, no one much faults Mother Nature. The National Park Service, however, is another story. A few years ago, it announced intentions to eradicate lupines from Acadia National Park on nearby Mount Desert Island. The lupines’ crime? They’re a non-native, potentially invasive species (an indictment that could give pause to some of us From Away transplants). Clearly, the National Park Service folks actually believed Maine’s state flower is the white pine cone and tassel. Equally obvious: they’d never encountered Mrs. Rumphius in their childhood reading.

The blowback to their announcement was immediate and huge. No one was going to strip Mainers of their lupines. The Park Service has since backed off.

All the while, the gardeners among us putter in our gardens where being a non-native plant species isn’t a punishable offense. Indeed, the ancestries of many of our gardens’ showiest specimens are foreign-born and were brought to our shores intentionally. Others, to get here, freeloaded, often in their seed stage infancy amidst ballast and packing crates (not unlike, unfortunately, the Asian long horn beetle). Arriving on our melting pot shores, some fussy outsiders took years to adapt, were slow to spread. Not so though with some of the hardier types of non-natives, the invasives who possess few manners, who don’t so much search out a niche as barge in and seize, happily grabbing a territory and claiming it as its own. Like Asiatic bittersweet. “Give it a millimeter and it’ll take a mile,” claims Maine science writer Hannah Holmes. And sadly, unchecked, bittersweet does. In the woods, far from any battles with virus or fungi, it’ll twine, choke, throttle, tree after tree.

Unwittingly, we home sapiens often transport invasives. Seduced by its craftily evolved flamboyance and ease which to a novice’s eye might resemble a meadow of more conservatively mannered lupines, we haul from place to place the bullying stranglehold and smothering sprawl of purple loosestrife. Or non-native honeysuckle. And it’s our distant ancestors after all, who, with admirable ambitions, boarded boats with pushy, block-busting starlings as well as English sparrows – obviously the idea of having on our shores every bird mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays must’ve seemed like a good one at the time. 

By comparison, how can we fault lupines, which, showing admirable restraint but no prejudice, brighten in similar manner culvert and meadow, dooryard and dump? Even when it’s not exactly as scheduled.