Russell lupins are playful plants, says Lisa Buckland, turning up in surprising places and in every colour of the rainbow. The perennial lupin we grow today is a hybrid called the Russell lupin, named after a Yorkshire gardener who loved them so much he dedicated over 20 years of his life to breeding them. When he started work on the Californian lupin, lupinus polyphyllus, it was a lax, wishy-washy purple. When he finished stirring in perennial and annual species from various parts of the globe, he'd created a yard-long spike with the genetic make-up to be any colour of the spectrum. Before George Russell, the bicolour lupin, that classic two-tone combination, didn't even exist.
展开▼
