Category — Fragrant plants

The datura in these pictures, ‘Evening Fragrance’, is identified as Datura meteloides, the same species as a wild datura that grows in my area. I got the wild datura to grow in my garden from seed once. Then I moved, and it wouldn’t. So basically, I bought a tame cultivar of a plant that grows wild in my area.

Probably.

There’s a lot of confusion in the botany of this genus. It’s pretty well agreed that the shrubbier plants whose flowers hang down are brugmansias, and the more herbaceous plants whose flowers point out or up are daturas. So now the hanging-down flowers have their own genus. But things are still murky in the genus datura, with a lot of argument over who belongs in what species, or whether it’s really a species at all. Since many of the daturas look a great deal alike (like Evening Fragrance, in fact) with only small variations, it’s not an easy question to settle. Someday I’m going to research it in depth so at least I know what the botanists are arguing about.

And then I suppose I’ll have to put any online sources on my RSS, so I can keep up with all the changes. When I was in high school and first learning Latin plant names, I remember feeling so satisfied with myself. “Once I learn these binomials, I’ll never have to learn them again,” I thought to myself. “Knowledge for life.” I knew that little about science, and the vagaries of human nature. Lumpers and splitters (the two categorizing types) have been with us forever. New DNA research has only churned up the delirium over who knows best.

Meanwhile, I’ll just keep growing daturas.

Evening Fragrance is, like many other daturas, not easy from seed. The seeds of daturas and brugmansias are hard to germinate; they seem to have very specific ideas about when they will sprout. But, while I have grown one or two daturas from seed, I’m still not sure what those ideas are, beyond the basics of warm and moist. J. L. Hudson ‘s genus description says that the annuals are easy from seed. Maybe so. But I notice that, along with regular datura seed, they offer datura seeds treated with gibberillic acid, which makes them easier to sprout.

For someone with a small garden and primitive breeding facilities, like me, it’s easier just to buy a plant. The trick is finding plants who like your climate. Some varieties of datura are hardier than others. There are daturas from India and Mexico; from the Northeastern, Southwestern, and Western U.S.; and from many places in Central and South America. The hardy ones from colder climates generally have smaller lavender flowers, without the intoxicating scent. Sorry.

By choosing a datura that grows wild in my area, I could be pretty sure that I’d picked one that would last. I have grown other daturas and brugmansias, but they haven’t liked my garden for long. Part of the reason for this may be that I can only offer them part sun, not the full baking sun they prefer. Or it may be something else.

So keep trying with datura species. Once you find the plants that like your climate, they will obligingly come up year after year.

They come up late, though. Each year I think, “Oh, it was too cold this winter. I’ve finally lost them. They froze.”

And then, sometime in May, I see this:

Fulfilled hope of beauty: sometimes confusing, but always the best intoxication.

References:

J. L. Hudson
Select Seeds

They say that datura’s intoxicating.

Well yes, it is. Is that bad?

Well, it is bad if you’re taking datura leaves internally. Or even if you make a paste and spread them on your skin. You can have respiratory failure, which in plain English means you stop breathing.

In the U.S. Pharmacopoeia of the 1800s, smoking datura leaves (a less drastic way of introducing the alkaloids to your body) was prescribed for asthma. So if you get it just right, instead of stopping breathing, you can stop from breathing fast and spasmodically. I wouldn’t recommend trying this at home, though. Remember, “intoxication” comes from the same root as “toxin”.

Eating datura, or rubbing a paste or salve on your skin, can have multitude of effects. You can hallucinate most unpleasantly, and be very sick to your stomach, for a very long time. Daturas can be used by experts to good effect-some tradtional healers have different kinds of datura or brugmansias growing in their yard. Each variety is good for divining a particular problem or illness in the village. Datura is said to be an herb used by European witches (who were, generally, shamans who were demonized by the Church) to travel to other realms and learn wisdom. In India, daturas are also regarded as sacred.

In fact, wherever it appears, datura is regarded as a holy plant. But holy means powerful. I have known datura to drive a person in a delicately balanced state over the edge, so there was no better solution than an institution. Treat daturas with respect. If you don’t know what you’re doing, back off.

But not too far.

Datura flowers can send me into an altered state even when they’re dead, as in the photo at the top of this post. And it’s a very pleasant sensation.

The slow bursting from velvety buds, the tight scroll unfurling in the evening, is a spectacular show.

And when the huge flower fully opens, you can bury your face deep within it. To me, it’s like a combination of fresh line-dried laundry, a hint of lemon, a whisper of sweet orange blossom, and a touch of something else.

Whatever it is, inhale it while you can, because by late morning, the flowers will be done.

Fortunately, there are more to come.

Next post: I go on about this datura

OK. If you read the first part of this post, now you know some of the African Queen’s family. But family, while always first, may not be the most urgent force in some relationships.

What you need to know is this: African Queen lilies are beautiful, and they smell like heaven. (“They smell like melon,” a friend of mine said. Not to me. But I get the fruitiness. There’s something fresh and earthy in the sweetness.)

Intoxication is only one of African Queen’s virtues. She has practical qualities as well. African Queen blooms in semishade, although the sunnier that semishade is, the more flowers you tend to get. They bloom for weeks, since each stem has at least a few buds, which open one at a time and last awhile. They grew like this for me in pots, even while wildfires filled our sky with smoke that was like cloudy weather–we didn’t see the sun (or much of anything) for three weeks.

Mine showed variations this year: you can see the deep purple outline on the anthers. (They might have had this variation before, but I didn’t have them propped up in a place where it was easy to see it.)

And then there are the variations through the day, as the light changes.

And the variations of the lilies as they age: the coloring changes, and they go from “please pollinate me” to slaked sated blooms that develop fat, incandescent seed pods.

If you want your bulbs to get bigger and produce more blooms, you should really deadhead the pods. But I keep a couple of the fattest, nicest-looking ones on. Partly because I want to try my hand at lily seeds and see what I can get. (So far I’ve managed to kill off my lily seedlings while they still looked like blades of grass. But hope springs eternal. And, after all, Debras got pretty good mileage out of one seedling.)

But a secret reason I keep the seed pods on is that I like the way they look.

There’s a secret reason I chose African Queen, too. I knew I wanted an orange trumpet lily. (I didn’t know yet that the more correct term for these trumpet/L. henryii crosses is Aurelian lily.)

But why did I choose African Queen, instead of Copper King or Anaconda? Because I saw the movie “The African Queen” at a film festival with my high school boyfriend, who was often more generous to me than I deserved. And I loved the film. And even though I haven’t seen it in years, I still do. Thus are garden decisions made.

But I do make garden decisions based on logic sometimes. For instance, here’s my opinion about lily bulbs: buy expensive ones.

I don’t mean expensive strains, particularly. But when I buy lily bulbs from less expensive providers, they (the bulbs, not the providers–although, now I come to think of it, I haven’t met the providers in person) are smaller and drier and have a tendency to fall apart. I plant them with hopes, but I tend not to see lilies in the growing season. Sometimes I don’t even see lily foliage.

Since lily bulbs (unlike most other types) are never really dormant, they are more sensitive to shipping conditions that don’t bother other bulbs. My theory is that the larger, more expensive bulb grades do better in storage and shipping just because they are bigger: they have more moisture and nutrients to draw on during the stressful period out of the ground. It might also be true that the more expensive bulb places know more about lilies and take better care of their bulbs.

I’m a little afraid to venture into the world of lily specialists. I’ve already got a serious bulb habit to support. But expensive and frustrating as they can be, there is just nothing like lilies. And if I grow the right varieties, I can have lilies in bloom for a lot of the summer…

References:

F.F. Rockwell and Esther C. Grayson and Jan de Graaff, The Complete Book of Lilies, Doubleday & Co., 1961

Jan de Graaff and Edward Hyams, Lilies, Funk & Wagnalls, 1968

Places to get African Queen:

Brent & Becky’s

Places to get Copper King:

Old House Gardens

It turns out I know less about trumpet lilies than I thought.

I mean, I’ve grown  four or five varieties successfully, most in containers. Although they were often not successful enough to bloom for more than one year, or to survive a transplant.

But beautiful fragrant ‘African Queen’ has bloomed so obligingly for me for the last three years. A totally delicious flower. I wanted to meet her family.

As families often are, it was more complicated than I’d imagined.

But first, let’s take a look at one of the reasons why lilies are such good value, even if they flower only once.

The bird-beak-like buds of African Queen offer beautiful color and suspense (when will they start opening?) for at least a week before the blooms (even in hot weather). They are so long, it’s hard to fit one in a camera frame.

OK. Now a little more about how this beautiful flower came into being.

Lilium henryii is the source of the orange color in the line of trumpet lilies that includes African Queen, Copper King, and the selection called Anaconda.

The other side of the family is a Chinese trumpet lily that emigrated to France. E. Debras, a plant-breeder in Orleans, took pollen from L. henryii and dusted it on that species trumpet lily, Lilium sargentiae.

Alas, the marriage proved infertile. But Debras was persistent; year after year he made the cross, and years later (in 1925) he finally got two viable seeds. One seedling died; the other went on to become the founder of a whole new dynasty. He named it L. x Aurelianense, after his town of Orleans.

So I finally found out what an Aurelian lily really is! Later in the century, Oregon Bulb Farms had a massive breeding program involving Aurelian lilies, trumpet lilies, and L. henryii. This created the first yellow Aurelian, ‘Golden Clarion’. And went on to come up with the African Queen strain, the first orange trumpets: African Queen, Copper King, and Anaconda.

Next post: African Queen: Secret Passions.

References:

F.F. Rockwell and Esther C. Grayson and Jan de Graaff, The Complete Book of Lilies, Doubleday & Co., 1961

Jan de Graaff and Edward Hyams, Lilies, Funk & Wagnalls, 1968

Edward Austin McRae, Lilies, Timber Press, 1998

Brent and Becky’s Bulbs summer-flowering bulbs catalogue, 2008 (they are also my source of African Queen lilies)