George Russell of York was an allotment gardener who developed a passion for Lupins. (My preferred spelling is Lupins rather than Lupines.) For more than 20 years he saved seed from the best plants and ruthlessly destroyed the others. He began with Lupinus polyphyllus but added some annual species and a shrub lupin and let the bees do the cross-pollinating. It seems reasonable though; that once he had produced a pink such as Chatelaine and the white Noble Maiden that open pollination would need to be avoided. Russell Lupins were a sensation at the 1937 Chelsea Flower Show.
It is a crying shame that Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children calls them poisonous. They are not alone. You can find lupins on many such lists. Go to Nova Scotia Museum’s Poison Patch museum.gov.ns.ca/poison/lupin for more misleading facts and fictions. The page devoted to lupins immediately ropes-in black locust, laburnum and scotch broom. You must read carefully since the most serious of consequences apply to laburnum alone and those perils are greatly exaggerated. They do say that the greatest danger of lupin poisoning is to grazing livestock. There are a number of wild lupins growing in cattle country and is part of the animals foraging diet. Under some very rare circumstances lupins are said to cause ‘crooked calf’ disease. It is claimed that contaminated milk has caused birth defects in humans. I don't beleive that for a moment.
Although it might bring us to the same result, it is quite possible that it is not the lupin plant itself that is the cause but that a fungus growing on the lupin that is the real source of the toxin. Note too that the flower used to illustrate the page is not a weedy wild form but a cultivated hybrid which is deceitful or at least unhelpful.
We have come a huge distance from George Russell’s beautiful flowers and we appear to have got totally lost along the way.
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