They are rapidly going by, but there is still time for a word about the lovely blue flower that grows wild and blossoms in June along roadsides and in meadows.

Lupine goes to seed upward from the bottom of its flower, a narrow conical cluster sometimes more than a foot high. The petals gradually give way to little furry pea-like things, which in turn grow to look like tiny pea pods. (Why not? They are in the pea family.) The pods soon pop open, releasing tiny black seeds, which the wind scatters for a bigger next year’s crop.

That has mostly happened already on the mainland, but on Maine’s offshore islands some lupine are still in their prime. The flowers are mostly blue, but some have interbred and come up white or pink or deep magenta.

They grow fine naturally, but gardeners find them hard to plant. Some say they must be kept between wet layers of paper napkin until they germinate. Nonetheless, Miss Rumphius, a character in a children’s book by that name, scattered lupine seeds all over New England to make the land more beautiful.

The National Park Service is said by some to have scattered lupine seeds from an airplane after the great Mount Desert fire of 1947, to restore the lupine fields. Not so, says Linda Gregory, the chief botanist for Acadia National Park. She says the park would never reseed the common lupine, because it is not native to Maine. In fact, lupinus polyphyllus, its scientific name, is seen as something of a pest, verging on an invasive species. It migrated from the Pacific Northwest and flourishes here, crowding out native grasses.

Maine used to have its own native lupine, with a smaller flower, always blue, called lupinus perenis, says Ms. Gregory. But it was always rare, and the last stand, in western Maine, died around 10 years ago when workmen paved the area to make a raceway. Botanists say it was “extirpated.”

Ancient peoples anticipated the park’s somewhat sour view of the flower. They named it for the word for wolf, in the belief that it devoured the soil.