National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/The Texas Bluebonnet

The Texas Bluebonnet (Lupinus texensis Hook)


When the legislature of Texas came to consider the issue raised by the flowers in their respective bids for Lone Star fame, it had a wide range of candidates, active and receptive, from which to choose. There were primroses and phloxes, euphorbiæ, salvias, Texas plumes, Texas fire-wheels, rain lilies, and Indian paintbrushes, but the Texas bluebonnet—a different flower, by the way, from the bluebonnets of Europe—won the day, and is crowned queen of Texas' floral empire. It blooms in the spring and has a range rather more limited than most of the State flowers. One authority tells us that it is a great home body and never crosses the Texas line or the Mexican border. But when it is recalled that Texas is approximately as large as all the Atlantic Seaboard States down to and including South Carolina, it will be seen that it has a rather extensive habitat at that.

To the botanist the Texas bluebonnet is known as Lupinus because of its reputedly insatiable appetite. For generations it was believed that flowers of this genus were wolfish in the amount of plant food consumed, and that they virtually exhaust the soil on which they grow. Hence their name of wolf flowers. Happily, this charge has been proved an unjust one. The lupines are, it is true, found in sterile, waste lands, gravelly banks, exposed hills, and like places; but they do not impoverish the land. Rather they choose poor soil for their home, adding to the landscape's beauty and fertility.

There are about seventy species of lupines in America, mostly in the West. They can justly lay claim to being among the most brilliant of all the denizens of Nature's garden. Many a sandy waste they transform into an oasis of color. The blossom has five petals, the upper one an advertising banner announcing to the passing bee that the table within is laden with choicest viands, and that no daintier food was ever served in flower land. There are two side petals which serve as landing stages for the aëronauts of insectdom and two others which touch at the bottom and resemble the keel of a boat. When the bee alights on the landing stage the keel opens up, and the table, all set and garnished, greets the hungry visitor's eye.

The lupines sleep at night. Some species transform their horizontal stars of day to vertical stars at night; others shut them down around the stem like an umbrella around the ferrule.

Source: —, ed. (June 1917), “Our State Flowers: The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 497. (Illustration from page 512.)