Mount Desert Island - Isle au Haut

I did a fair bit of hiking around Isle Au Haut both on roadsides and trails, and looked around the campsites by Duck Harbor. The only specimen I found even remotely resembling lupine was more likely a Delphinium; there were some obvious signs that it wasn't lupine. So I identified it as "not lupine." Isle Au Haut, being very remote, looked fairly pristine with a couple exceptions - I suspect that I might have encountered Rosa multiflora (not having that species card, I couldn't make the definite ID), and there were plenty devastated stands of spruce from the invasive staghorn beetle. But as the park service brochure rather brightly pointed out, these did make for some spacious newly opened areas for other species to populate.

From her post, it appears that Cynthia did not find lupine on the roadsides of Mt. Desert Island, either.

From these two observations, we could draw different conclusions. In the optimistic vein of said park service brochure, we could conclude that neither island has lupine. However, due to the obvious fact that neither of us did an exhaustive survey of the entire islands, that conclusion is not well-supported. While our prediction that lupine is more likely to exist on Mt. Desert than Isle Au Haut may still stand, our data neither decisively supports nor refutes it. It is entirely possible that our supposition that roads would be the vector for lupine invasion may have been faulty. Thus our findings indicate the need for further investigation that accounts for a different invasion vector. I would therefore recommend that a future search be conducted not on roadsides, but nearer to residential areas. Here's why I think that. Bearing in mind that lupine is a common garden plant (thank you for the Miss Rumphius reference, Cynthia), it would stand to reason that plantings around homes might be a likely vector for its distribution. As my survey of Isle Au Haut was limited to nothing more developed than the backcountry dirt roads, and failed to extend into the inhabited part of the island, an investigation of that area that yielded no lupines would be much more decisive evidence to support our hypothesis.