Like so many Mainers before me, I grew up with a well-loved copy of Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius on my bookshelf. The titular character, better known in my family simply as “the Lupine Lady,” took on a sort of folkloric presence in my childhood. In the backseat of sleepy return trips from the beach, I often imagined her pedaling a bike alongside the car, scattering lupine seeds to spring up in the hills and gullies along Route 27.
Today, lupines have firmly cemented themselves as my favorite flower. Their short-lived anthesis marks the turning of the seasons, blooming briefly during those long, sunlit days of mid-June. Dotting highway ditches and coastal meadows, the iconic lupinus polyphyllus are an invasive species. But for many Mainers, they still herald the solstice and the start of our long-awaited summer months.
I was lucky enough to spend this fleeting time of year in a photography workshop with Benjamin Williamson, a beloved photographer known for his dramatic, colorful shots of the Maine coast. With a crew of four other photographers and twice as many cameras, we spent a day chasing the light across two Midcoast peninsulas.
The workshop was bookended by lighthouses—sunrise on Pemaquid Point and sunset on Marshall Point—and filled with stops at working waterfronts. In New Harbor’s Back Cove, I focused my lens on dewy lobster traps. At the Port Clyde Fisherman’s Co-op, I tracked boats humming across the horizon. These places, though active year-round, were thrumming with that late-spring crescendo of anticipation for the busy season.
But throughout the day it was the abundant lupines that always seemed to catch my eye. A detour through Bristol brought me to a field of the flowers overlooking Round Pond—not too far from where the woman who inspired Miss Rumphius once lived in Christmas Cove. Their buds, sporting colors of indigo and rose, framed a glittering harbor, and I found myself basking in the satisfying symbolism of it all. The coast’s sepia palette had given way to the full saturation of a bustling Maine summer.
Georgia Howe (she/her) is a writer and creative based in Hallowell. She is the content marketing specialist at Island Institute and a staff writer for Same Faces Collective.
