In one Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch, John Cleese plays a Robin Hood-like highwayman who steals to redistribute wealth, but only in one currency: lupines.
While useless to the sketch’s needy townspeople, lupine flowers have real-life history as status symbols. Thousands of lupine breeds have been cultivated across the world for centuries to be used as decoration, food and to improve soil health. Among the most well-known lupines are blue bonnets. Most others have a similar style.
Until just over a decade ago, Mary and John Mallonee, Boistfort dairy farmers, had no idea these precious purple petals grew in their backyard. One day, a stranger on a bike who rode by spotted them: Kincaid’s lupine.
According to the U.S. Forest Service, in nearly 150 years of consistent agricultural use of the Pacific Northwest’s prairies, especially in Oregon’s Willamette River Valley, the stamping out of biodiversity has led to a 99% loss of habitat for Kincaid’s lupine. The delicate purple flower, which blooms for just a short time around early June, was declared threatened under the Federal Endangered Species Act in 2000.
“Luckily, we had friends in … U.S. Fish and Wildlife,” said Maynard Mallonee, Mary and John’s son. “They virtually said, ‘If you don’t make a plan, they will make a plan for you.’”
It’s already threatened, but Kincaid’s lupine was being eyed by conservationists and government agencies for another reason. It’s the only flower that sustains the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly. Both species are named for naturalists.
In the Mallonees’ field, another mutualistic relationship is easier to see than the extremely rare butterfly. Kincaid’s lupine hosts ants. Mary Mallonee doesn’t know the name of the ants, but after more than a decade of working to preserve their favorite flower, she knows just about everything else.
The ants pollinate, and the flower rewards them with a sticky, nectar-like treat.
Walking along through her field, in a mound of dirt barely distinguishable from the ground around it, Mary Mallonee bends down and gently scratches the earth with her fingernail. In less than a second, the ground is swimming with the ants, and her serious look shifts to a huge grin.
How can she read the around 40 different flowers and grasses in the prairie? Or tell one flower stalk — which, most of the year, is a prairie's typical green — from the next?
“They were going to tell us how we had to do what we had to do,” she said.
Maynard Mallonee chimed in, “We sat down at the table and made a written plan. Like, when do you need to pull the cows off? What’s that stage?”
‘The Dairy Farmers’
For their work, KCTS-9, a PBS station, featured the Mallonees in an around eight-minute mini-documentary titled “The Dairy Farmers.” A quiet slice of their life in the Boistfort Valley, it describes how the flower changed the family’s life.
Twenty years ago, John and Mary Mallonee, parents of Maynard, Jodi and Diana, became the first farmers in Lewis County to be certified organic. They were the fourth certified farm in Washington. Despite the couple having grown up together in the valley, the Mallonees still recall harsh judgment from their neighbors.
“If you were an organic person, you really, number one, had to be a hippie, or, number two, you were a liar,” Maynard Mallonee said. “I got called ‘liar’ a lot of times.”
The generation before John and Mary would have qualified to be certified, too — had the certification existed at the time.
“My grandfather, who ran the farm, he was a nonbeliever in spraying, fertilizing and all that stuff. We’d already been pasturing the cows, making our own feed. We’d already been doing it, and there was a premium price (for organic milk),” Maynard Mallonee said. “So, if you’re already doing something and get paid a premium, why not?”
It was not easy, Mary Mallonee said. A few years later, people heard about the lupines.
“Well, then we were getting a lot of flack, weren’t we son?” she said. “I mean, people were like, ‘You just gotta cut it. You’ve got to spray it. You’ve got to get rid of it.’”
Kincaid’s lupine, when in bloom, can poison cows. In a pregnant cow, it can cause crooked calf syndrome, Maynard Mallonee said.
Fortunately, they don’t prefer to eat it. And steers won’t be bothered by the flowering plant. Between rotating pastures, the Mallonees not only preserved Kincaid’s lupine, but increased its presence. Hooking its seeds to the bovines’ hooves, it spread. Last week, lupines dotted their prairie in watercolor-esque purple and little butterflies dashed between the blooms.
Their attention to the lupine has also given way to success for various other flowers and grasses. Many are among the most critically endangered plants in Washington.
They’ve never positively identified Fender’s blue butterfly; to do so, they’d have to kill one.
“We do see blue butterflies,” Mary Mallonee said.
John Mallonee died in 2016.
On Saturday, June 17, at 1 p.m., the Mallonees will host a nature walk in their field. It’s open to all, but is especially for prairie conservationists who want to learn about the lupine.
“It’s just the way we live and the way we’ve been,” Mary Mallonee said. “It’s not anything we really did purposefully. It’s just how we do things. And, I think, John is supposed to be here, sharing. It’s hard, because this is the first pasture walk since he died.”
