Friday, June 17, 2011

The Lupines are Blooming on Deer Isle

Last week we visited friends on Deer Isle in Maine. Harold will presently write it up and attach lots of pictures, whereupon you can eyeball his page an be dazzled. Right now, though, I thought I'd sit down and give you a foretaste before we unpacked.

This weekend is the Lupine Festival, in case you're in the neighborhood of Mid-coast Maine. The lupines are a right treat. Spiky and blue, when they aren't white or pink, hey have a nice smell, subtle and spicy. Right now they are blooming all over the island and beyond. People will come pouring onto the island for the Lupine Festival, filling the restaurants, jamming the parking places, hiring seats in airplanes to buzz the local gardens and see the flowers from above. I'm glad not to be on Deer Isle for the festival, though it was good to see the flowers before everybody else and his brother got here. It sounds almost like Lambertville's Shad Festival, an annual event hated and cursed by the locals (but great fun for tourists).

They say the lupines are not native to the island, but were brought in from away, took off, and naturalized themselves. I guess we're all like that. It would be good if we could smell that good and look that pretty.

Kate Gallison

3 comments:

  1. It looks beautiful, Kate. But I can't help laughing because it reminds me of the Monty Python skit about the outlaws who go around England robbing lupines. "Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore riding through the glen. Dennis Moore, Dennis Moore with his merry men!"

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  2. Pat, I see that your reference is to a YouTube video, to which you have kindly sent me a link by email. Here it is, for the entertainment of our other viewers:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLkhx0eqK5w&feature=youtube_gdata_player

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  3. Thanks, Kate for posting the link. I couldn't figure out how to do that. My family and I once saw lupines blooming in Nova Scotia, and we laughed so hard when we saw the Monty Python skit that we have been singing the song (with wrong words, evidently) every time we heard the word "lupines" ever since. I hope you enjoyed the silly MP skit, which I easily found on You Tube, that you are having fun in the north land.

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