In June in Toronto, Spadina’s garden is my favourite place to photograph. In Toronto, I get my June fix of multi-colored Russell Hybrids at the spectacular four-square potager garden behind the Spadina House Museum where they grow with lots of old-fashioned flowers. There’s a good story on George Russell and his lupine breeding here. As for the crosses, he always claimed he let the bees do the breeding work for him, but he selected the best colour combinations, gave them names and saved the seed to sell. He planted many lupine species together in his two allotments, including the blue-purple North American species Lupinus polyphyllus – which had been brought back to Britain from the Pacific Northwest by explorer David Douglas in the 1820s – along with yellow bush lupine ( L. In fact, most of the colourful garden lupines are the offspring of those developed from 1911-1942 by the British horticulturist George Russell (1857-1951). The British tend to refer to them as lupins. I’ve always added the “e” to mine, given that’s how the North American clan are usually spelled. Who doesn’t love lupines? Or lupins, if you like. If you’d like a little 4-minute bedtime story, have a listen to me reading it to my granddaughter Emma. Third, it honours the essential gardening impulse to “make the world more beautiful”. Second, it’s a story about enchanting lupines. Barbara Cooney died in 2000 at the age of eighty-two.I have a particular fondness for the award-winning book Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney (Viking, 1982). Her beloved book Miss Rumphius was the winner of the American Book Award in 1982. She was a two-time Caldecott Medal winner, for Chanticleer and the Foxin 1959 and Ox-Cart Man in 1980. The art for Miss Rumphius has a permanent home in the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.īarbara Cooney traveled the world, lived in a house by the sea in Maine, and made the world more beautiful through her art. The illustrations have been reoriginated, going back to the original art to ensure state-of-the-art reproduction of Cooney’s exquisite artwork. Miss Rumphius received the American Book Award in the year of publication. The countless lupines that bloom along the coast of Maine are the legacy of the real Miss Rumphius, the Lupine Lady, who scattered lupine seeds everywhere she went. Barbara Cooney’s story of Alice Rumphius, who longed to travel the world, live in a house by the sea, and do something to make the world more beautiful, has a timeless quality that resonates with each new generation.
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