I remember thinking, when I was in southern Arizona this spring, that their lupines were so much prettier than ours. As if to rebuke me for my disloyalty to New Mexican wildflowers, Mother Nature popped up the most beautiful lupine display I’ve ever seen in the Sandia mountains just a couple of months later.
Silvery lupine, the type found in the Sandias, often looks a bit faded and scraggly to me. But this year there were many more flower stalks than usual, and the flowers seemed to be a more vivid purple than I remembered. They were surrounded by unusually tall green grass as well.
The bees apparently approved too. The bee above had already collected quite a bit of pollen on its leg (and there was just as much on the other side).
Most years, lupine blooms in the Sandias for a couple of weeks near the end of May and that’s the end of the story. This year, it bloomed through the entire month of June.
And then, when I went up to southern Colorado at the beginning of summer, I saw even more lupine, mostly in meadows. Although it too was silvery lupine, it once again seemed to be a more vibrant purple than I’m used to seeing.
I wondered if the beauty of the Arizona lupines had somehow become inflated in my memory, so I took a look at my spring photos.
Nope! Those Sonoran Desert lupines are such a vivid blue, with those bright yellow and white centers1 — how could I possibly not love them? But after Mother Nature’s fabulous display of silvery lupines this year, I no longer think of them as “better” than ours either.
I’m really not sure what this Arizona lupine is called. Maybe Coulter’s lupine (aka desert lupine)? Please don’t quote me.
I enjoy wild lupines - they are such a gift to the pollinators!
Thanks, as always, Lisa.
Beautiful!