Lupinus polyphyllus

Bigleaf lupine

Family: Fabaceae · Type: perennial · Native

Bigleaf lupine is a California native perennial found in western North American mountain and coastal habitats from low to mid-elevation ranges. Flowering from May to August, this plant produces blue, violet, lavender, pink, or white flowers with distinctive yellow to white spots that occasionally turn red-purple, clustered in open inflorescences 5 to 40 centimeters long. Growing 15 to 150 centimeters tall with erect green stems, it develops a robust structure with both basal and stem-based leaves. Its distinctive leaves feature 5 to 17 green to silver leaflets, each 3 to 15 centimeters long and 5 to 25 millimeters wide, arranged in a palmate configuration. The fruit is a hairy pod 2 to 5 centimeters long containing 3 to 9 seeds.

California counties: Alpine, El Dorado, Tulare, Fresno, Del Norte, Placer, Mono, Nevada, Sierra, Modoc, Marin, Plumas, Humboldt, Napa, Tuolumne, Santa Cruz, Siskiyou, San Mateo, Monterey, Shasta, Mendocino, San Francisco, Glenn, Sonoma, Santa Clara, Lake, Solano, Yolo, Tehama

Data from The California Species Project — 14,000+ California species with verified data from CNPS, CDFW, USFWS, Jepson eFlora, Cal-IPC, and more.