Wealth of colors

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Florists are pretty biased towards lupine. Still would! After all, he filled the forest edges, scattered across the fields and along the roads - everywhere he placed his lovely pink and purple bouquets of candles.

But if you look closely, the lupine flower is not so simple at all! It looks like a small casket, in the depths of which a real dagger is hidden - as sharp and curved as a small samurai saber.

We are used to seeing in the forest and in abandoned old garden plots ordinary lupine - with pink and light purple flowers. His flowers sit freely on the central stem and cannot please us with a variety of colors and shades.

A completely different thing - cultural lupine. Its flowers sit on the central stalk, like corn kernels on the cob, - densely-dense to each other, so that it feels like we have not one flower, but a whole amazing bouquet. And the color scheme, which affects us cultivated lupine! When I suggested to one of my country friends to take lupine seeds from me and plant them on my plot, she gave me such a contemptuous look and informed me that such a “garbage” plant would never let me into my garden! But when she looked at me on a visit, she ran in full admiration to consider what kind of amazing flowers they grow not only around the playground, but also at the ends of each garden and are visible even from the road. And my lupins were just in all their glory - they showed the world all the shades of yellow, pink, red, raspberry, blue, blue, lilac, purple. Variegated combinations of pink with a lighter pink petal and pink with a darker pink petal, pink with a yellow petal, red with a raspberry petal, are fascinating.

All the lupins that live in my country house are originally grown from seeds.. First, I bought a bag of red lupine seeds and planted them on seedlings. In the first year, seedlings grew to 30 cm tall, and in the fall I transplanted them to a permanent place. In the spring of the second year, they already turned into young, slender “trees” and from the first of June pleased me with magnificent scarlet bouquets. Flowering lasted two to three weeks. I left one ear on each plant to receive seeds, and I removed all the rest. In mid-July, a second wave of flowering began. In the fall, I gathered ripened seed boxes and planted them on seedlings the following spring.. From these seeds, plants have already grown with a slightly changed color of the flowers - a little more light red and even almost yellow. So gradually I got purple lupins and yellow, as well as a whole gamut of intermediate colors and shades. Unfortunately, it is impossible to let the cultivation of cultural lupine “take its course” - it is not as sturdy and hardy as its wild brother. Therefore, from year to year, I still sow the seeds of the shades I like in the greenhouse and in the autumn I plant the grown seedlings in a new permanent place.

I strongly advise you - make friends with this wonderful flower. He will not leave you indifferent. And with it, an entire army of bees, bumblebees and other sweet-loving insects will rush into your garden, and thanks to them, not a single flower on your apple, plum, cherry will be left without attention and will delight you with a wonderful ripe fruit.