Lupins in a Cottage Garden Border

Most garden lupines go back to George Russell, a gardener in York, England, who spent around twenty years crossing them before showing his plants in 1937. His hybrids brought the pinks, creams, purples and two-tone spikes that now fill cottage borders. All of those colors turn up in the lupine jigsaw puzzle, where a crowded bed lines a brick path beside an old wooden fence, the leaves still holding raindrops. Some spires are still tight green buds while others are fully open.