A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
lupine
A lupine is a legume with leaves divided into leaflets radiating from a single point like the spokes of a wheel, and a tall dense spike of pea flowers in blue, purple, yellow, or white. Several hundred species grow across the Americas, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. Like other legumes, it hosts bacteria in root nodules that pull nitrogen out of the air, so it thrives on poor ground and leaves it better than it found it.
Etymology
The name is Latin for wolf, and it records a mistake that lasted centuries. Because lupines grew vigorously on thin, poor, sandy soil, Roman and later writers concluded that the plant was wolfing the ground, stripping the fertility out of it. The truth is the reverse: The plant does well there because it makes its own nitrogen, and it enriches the soil rather than exhausting it.
Notes
The seeds of several species have been eaten around the Mediterranean for thousands of years, soaked at length to leach out the bitter alkaloids, and sweet varieties bred for low alkaloid content are grown as a crop. The Texas bluebonnet is a lupine, as are the great stands that turn subalpine meadows blue in the western mountains in early summer.