Val Bourne on a pepper-scented floral favourite back in vogue

One plant that seemed to be right in vogue at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show was the lupin, a pepper-scented stalwart of my 1950s’ childhood.

Pale-yellow lupins appeared in the two or three gardens and Sarah Conibear’s Westcountry Nurseries (www.westcountrylupins.co.uk/ 01237 431111) staged a colourful Silver Gilt display in The Grand Pavilion.

They looked almost like rockets taking off and her nursery has definitely revived an interest in these May-flowering plants.

However in the 1950s every garden grew some lupins: they were an essential plant. They were almost certainly Russell lupins bred by George Russell of York, a superstar of the gardening world in my childhood.

Woolworths, the provider of seeds and plants for most people then, sold packets of his seeds emblazoned with a mustachioed George in his white granddad shirt. I can still see them, as if it was yesterday.

Russell began breeding lupins at the age of 54 when working as a jobbing gardener in York for a Mrs Micklethwaite. He noticed a vase of rather weedy looking blooms that she’d picked from her garden and thought that he could improve on them. It took him 20 years to select his strain, using species collected from various sources including botanic gardens. He grew them on three allotments and staged his first Chelsea exhibit in 1937, aged 79, to great acclaim.

Many people tried to buy up his stock, but George resisted. However in his later years Russell’s lupins were grown in fields attached to Baker’s Nursery at Boningale, near Wolverhampton. They distributed them by mail order and films of the colourful fields, in segregated blocks of colour, can be seen on the internet. Russell normally sowed and grew on 5000 lupins every year and then whittled them down to 250 or so. A few would be named every year and then new plants were raised from cuttings taken from the selected few, once they had been bulked up in the field.

Russell died in 1951 aged 94, probably still wearing his gardening boots. The breeding worked stopped with him, although his named lupins were still grown and sold by Bakers Nursery.

However an outbreak of Cucumber Mosaic Virus led them to lose vigour, or die, and by the 1970s it was almost impossible to raise Russell’s lupins from cuttings commercially. Seeds were collected and stored in canvas sacks, but the public abandoned the lupin in favour of the shrub, until Sarah Conibear’s lupin exhibits ignited interest again.

There’s a living link between George Russell’s lupins and Sarah’s and that connection is Johnny Walker, a former policeman. As a boy he regularly cycled past George Russell’s fields and marvelled at the stature and perfection of the lupins. As a young man he visited Bakers and was generously handed some of Russell’s seed stock which had already been segregated into colours. Johnny began growing and selecting lupins on his allotment, just as Russell had, and was filmed by Channel 4 for a programme called Bloom in the mid-1990s.

Sarah saw the programme and fell in love with them and contacted Johnny. By then he was looking for someone else to carry on his breeding work, so he generously supplied seeds of his best plants, in jam jars. Johnny always encouraged Sarah and he helped her every year at Chelsea. He had the thrill of seeing her get two Gold Medals, but he died last August aged 75, from a sudden heart attack. We both miss his twinkling eyes greatly and Chelsea seemed a little flat. I still have a pot of the seeds he sent me and I must sow some!

Sarah’s lupins are every bit as wonderful as Russell’s, but her plants are micropropagated so, should they go down with virus, they can be heat-treated to eradicate the virus.