Lupine flowers: lush greenery and a riot of colors on your flowerbed

Lupine flowers are bright and distinctive representatives of the legume family, used in group plantings with other single and perennials for the decoration of flower beds and lawns. Quite often, lupine is underestimated by amateur gardeners, since most of them only know varieties with blue, blue-white and pink color inflorescences, close to wild-growing. In fact, there are a lot of hybrids of garden lupins with a wide variety of colors: white, yellow, blue, pink, carmine, red, cream, purple, etc.

Lupine is a grassy plant native to the meadows of the Mediterranean and North America. Its leaves, resembling a spread palm, are attached to the trunk alternately on long thin petioles. Inflorescences are racemose, forming a fetus - bean upon maturation. Lupine flowers are unpretentious and surprisingly fruitful plants: for the appearance of the real thickets of lupine, it is enough that only one seed was picked up by the wind, dropped and sprouted in the ground. Like many other plants from the legume family, lupine can feel comfortable and grow successfully even on poor, depleted soils, since its root system can extract nutrients from the deepest layers of the soil. And if experienced gardeners appreciate lupine flowers for the lush shape of its bush and bright shades of inflorescences, then agronomists - for the ability to enrich the soil with nitrogen that accumulates in nodule bacteria on its roots.

Care Features

Lupine - a plant unpretentious in care. All that he needs for a comfortable existence on your personal plot is timely watering, pruning and transplanting every few years.

Garden flower lupine does not require special organization of the irrigation system. Provided that in the summer it will rain at least once a week, lupine does not require additional watering at all. In addition, his leaves are able to collect dew. If the day is particularly hot, in the evening the lupine will not give up spraying with cool water.

Bush formation

Outwardly, the lupine bush looks like lush curly thickets, but over time the plant grows old, the neck of the bush rises above the ground, the middle dies, and the side rosettes move away from each other - as a result of which the plant no longer looks so attractive. To avoid this, lupine bushes are spudded to stimulate the formation of lateral roots, helping to maintain the decorativeness of the bush.

Flowering period

As a rule, lupins bloom in mid-May. If you cut off the fading "candle" in time, you can achieve repeated flowering in August.

Rest and wintering care

Lupine flowers are frost-resistant plants: they can withstand temperatures of up to -8 degrees, therefore, especially careful preparation for wintering is not required. It will be enough to cut the stems of the plant shortly.

Transplantation and reproduction

Lupine bush can grow in the same place without transplanting for 4-6 years. Propagation of this garden plant is carried out using seeds or dividing an adult bush. If you want to keep the collection hybrid that you liked for its original color, it is better to choose propagation by cuttings from an adult plant, because with the help of seeds it is impossible to achieve the same color in the next generation with guarantee.

As you can see, everything is quite simple. Trust your imagination and imagination, you will see how the flowers of lupins will transform your garden. The photo shows how original a flowerbed decorated with these garden flowers can be.