GEORGE RUSSELL - Creator of the 
Famed Russell Perennial Lupins 
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“George ‘Russell and “Sonny 
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amongst his. flowers they both loved so well 
The Specialist and his Flowers 
In the gardens of England, Lupins are 
standing like many-colored sentinels. Their 
perennial arrival brings contentment to 
every gardener, but to an old man of ninety 
three years, Mr. George Russell, it must 
bring a fuller sentiment. 
For it was not Nature but Mr. Russell wha 
created the Lupin as we know it, making end- 
less variations on its original theme of simple 
blues and white and, in his single-minded 
lifetime, adding more color to the English 
garden than any other man in horticultural 
history. 
For many years of the Victorian era, Mr. 
Russell worked as a simple jobbing gardener 
in Yorkshire, tending the lawn and borders 
of various middle-class persons, in particular 
a certain Mrs. Micklethwaite, and in the 
evenings, working on his own allotment. In 
the present century, his likeness smiles from 
packets containing Lupin seeds throughout 
the world. He brought this fame upon him- 
self simply by following his own bent for his 
own pleasure, absorbed in his allotment and 
his potting shed and asking help only of the 
bees. 
Once he had given the Russell Lupin to 
the world, there was really no other Lupin 
worth its border-space. But it is evident 
that he never had thought of himself as 
working for the world, or for a limitless 
posterity of gardeners. The Lupin in its 
original form seemed to him an unsatisfact- 
ory flower; and so he set about trying to 
breed a better one, likely to look “nice” on 
his allotment in York or in the gardens where 
he was employed for a few shillings a day. 
A brief but knowing compliment from the 
men who worked the allotments near his own 
was probably the only recognition that he 
expected or desired. When news began to 
leak out of unimagined splendors beside the 
early potatoes and among the makesfift 
sheds of the York allotments, Russell seems 
at first to have rejected offers of fame and 
comparative fortune with genuine embarr- 
assment. 
Mr. Russell was born in 1857 in the village 
of Stillington, in Yorkshire. He remembers 
being taken as a boy to a flower show, 
where he saw Lupins decked out in the 
original simplicity of their blues and whites. 
They seem to have made an impression, 
since he remembers them even now. But if 
the idea than occurred to him that he could 
grow something better, it was an unconsc- 
ionable time maturing. Forty years later 
he found himself staring with unrelieved 
dissatisfaction at a vase of the same old blue 
Lupins on the diningroom table in the 
Barnsley home of Mrs. Micklethwaite. And 
he still thot Lupins were too thin, too color- 
less, and the wrong shape. 
Then Russell began to let his creative im- 
pulse have its way, altho he had reached an 
age when men are usually past being advent- 
urous. Unlike the general run of jobbing 
gardeners, men who seem to be wholly ab- 
sorbed in the life of the subsoil and are slow 
and reluctant of human contact, Mr. Russell 
knew what was going on in the world; in the 
world of gardening, at all events. 
He had heard of a German grower who 
was offering annual Lupins which seemed 
to have some of the virtues Russell thought 
Lupins should have; a plump round keel 
(the “slipper” part of the flower) and 
flattened-out standards (the pair of wings 
which in the old-fashioned Lupin are folded 
back). But annuals die when they have 
flowered; Russell’s idea was to marry these 
German annuals to the English perennials 
and so establish a line of Lupins in which 
the German qualities might be given a hardy 
English permanence. 
Once he had started, Russell’s appetite for 
experiment grew. For 15 years he patiently 
crossed and re-crossed his Lupins, ruthlessly 
scrapping inferior seedlings, struggling all 
the time with his main problem, the mortality 
of the annual strain. In June, 1925, his 
allotment was already blazing with the bright 
dawn of success, filled with Lupins such as 
the world had never seen. There were 
Lupins with tall, symmetrical spikes in as- 
tounding new colors and mixtures of colors; 
Lupins with outspread standards and plump 
keels which gave the flowers a rich, abundant 
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