When you think about traditional Maine icons, a certain set of images comes to mind: lobster, blueberries, puffin, lighthouse, moose, and lupine, blooming now in breathtaking masses of blue, pink, and white spires along our roadsides and in our fields. Pop into any tourist souvenir shop or art gallery featuring Maine art, and you’ll find lupines gracing everything from t-shirts, jewelry, cards, bars of soap, and magnets to fine paintings and pottery. You can “like” a Facebook page devoted to Maine Wild Lupine Fields. Down East magazine’s website features links for where to view the best lupine fields in the Acadia National Park region and Downeast Maine. You can even buy packets of Maine lupine seeds to add this natural beauty to your own garden.

The heroine of the beloved Maine classic Mrs. Rumphius, by children’s author Barbara Cooney, makes the world more beautiful by spreading lupine seeds everywhere. So perhaps we can blame well-intentioned Mrs. Rumphius for the fact that the lupines we’re enjoying now as summer begins are, as we like to put it, “from away.”

That’s right, our lupine is not our own. It’s an introduction, a species from the Northwest. Marilyn J. Dwelley tells us, in her Summer and Fall Wildflowers of New England, “True wild lupine is not common in New England.” Native lupine, the all-blue Lupinus perennis, has, in fact, been extirpated from Maine, though small patches can apparently be found elsewhere in New England and in the Canadian Maritimes. We can take some small consolation from the fact that the lupine we so love here in Maine is not, at least, Texas Bluebonnet, another lupine species and the state flower of Texas. That would be downright embarrassing.

We Mainers have adopted as our own — you might even say, fiercely embraced — this escapee from cultivated gardens. When Acadia National Park proposed a plan to get rid of non-native lupines in the park a few years ago, the resulting uproar from local lupine lovers eventually led them to shelve the notion. Lupine might be the one exception to the oft-repeated rule that being born in Maine doesn’t necessarily make you a Mainer. This concept is better captured by the traditional line, “If your cat has her kittens in the oven, that doesn’t make them biscuits.” Feral lupines are, as it were, Maine biscuits.

But don’t eat them. While the name lupine, which means “wolf-like” in Latin, may refer to the way lupines invade a pasture, it’s also appropriate because the alkaloid-rich lupine plant is poisonous to livestock As a child I was taught this early. I had the job of making sure my grandmother’s sheep didn’t wander into the lupine patch as they were herded to and from their pasture each day.

But don’t eat them. While the name lupine, which means “wolf-like” in Latin, may refer to the way lupines invade a pasture, it’s also appropriate because the alkaloid-rich lupine plant is poisonous to livestock.

As a child I was taught this early. I had the job of making sure my grandmother’s sheep didn’t wander into the lupine patch as they were herded to and from their pasture each day. I didn’t want one of them to drop dead on my watch. This responsibility made me hyper-aware of where all the lupine plants were. I knew what they looked like even when those tall flowers weren’t in bloom, the leaf segments radiating from a central point, the fuzzy, grey, pea-like pods after the flowers had gone by. Perhaps deer, too, know to stay away from lupine, which would also enable the plant in its domination of a field or roadside.

As its appearance suggests, lupine is a legume, with the same nitrogen-fixing root nodules as peas, beans, and clovers. Thus, they generally improve the quality of the soil they’re in. Some species in Europe even produce edible beans, commonly referred to as lupini, but I’ve never heard of anyone eating lupine beans here in Maine.

Most accounts indicate that the beans need to be soaked for a good while in brine and then boiled to eliminate not only their bitter taste but also their toxicity. Perhaps one day lupini will turn out to be a trendy new eat-local food, but I don’t plan on trying any until I can be assured they’re actually edible here. There are around 280 different species of lupine world-wide, so there’s bound to be a lot of variation among species, including bean toxicity. (Fun fact gleaned from Wikipedia: in Oaxaca, Mexico, there’s a lupine species that can grow to be a 26-foot high bush!)

As we drive around in early June, we won’t enjoy fields full of native wild lupines in all their blue glory. But despite their ecological flaws, blooming lupines “from away” have come to embody the essence of a Maine summer.

Kristen Lindquist is an amateur naturalist and published poet who works for Coastal Mountains Land Trust in her hometown of Camden.

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