Category — Night-blooming plants

I love brugmansias and daturas, but they’ve been a disappointment to me. Especially the brugmansias.

Brugmansias (they used to be called tree daturas) just barely make it in my climate (USDA zone 8). My common experience with them is, just about the time they form a bud, frost hits. And that’s the end of the brugmansia for that year. Next year it will rise again, but not until later than you think possible: usually in the middle to end of May, when things start really warming up. Brugmansias (and their herby sisters daturas) love heat, and shrink away from the cold.

So that’s why I was shocked to come home from a holiday trip to find that my little struggling brugmansia, all of fourteen inches high (about 36 cm), had spouted a bloom.

In order to have a hope of seeing flowers before frost next year, this fall I laboriously made it a place  indoors - a place where I didn’t think it would thrive, but trusted it would at least not die to the ground (making more work for itself to get to blooming point next season). I had no anticipation that it would bloom, especially not when I went away, leaving the house cold.

What made this happen? Well, I did treat all my houseplants with an organic fertilizer called Voodoo Brew. Voodoo Brew inoculates the soil with some of the microorganisms that make soil nutrients more available to plants. You’re not supposed to use it on houseplants, but it makes my outdoor plants so happy, and my houseplants were looking crummy, and I’m not much of one for rules until I’ve tried them myself. And you’re supposed to use it in the growing season, not the dormant one, but (see above).

Another contributor to this miracle may have been the variety of brugmansia, ‘Cypress Gardens’.  This plant was bred (or selected, I’m not sure which) for containers, and it’s also meant to flower younger than other brugmansias.

Whatever the cause, I’ve got one, just one, beautiful flower trumpet breathing fragrance into the room of a night,

and showing off that particular sheen I’ve only found on the somewhat-stiff brugmansia trumpets.

An anthropology professor of mine once told me that brugmansias made her think of love; she and her husband had met in South America, and slept under the downbreathing trumpets of a brugmansia.

Actually, she said datura, because at that time the genus hadn’t been broken in two. Now it’s generally accepted that the shrubby plants with downward hanging flowers are in the genus Brugmansia, while the herbaceous (non-woody) plants with upward facing trumpets are in the Datura genus (these are the ones that are called Angel’s Trumpets in many catalogues).

The reason my professor and I were discussing daturas is that I was doing a paper on them; even then I loved them. The chemical constituents of  the different types of daturas and brugmansias are very closely related, although there are individual variations; in that paper I wrote I reported on a custom of some Amazonian shamans, of having several datura trees in their yards. Each variety had a special trait; each variety was used for a different type of divination. Finding a lost item might mean using one tree; helping an adolescent through the spiritual transformation into adulthood meant using another. The shaman knew which to use, how much to use, and how to guide someone through the experience safely.

No such shamans exist in my own culture (although many believe that European witches used daturas as their “flying” ointment, and had some skill in judging the dose and using the experience for spiritual gain). The datura/brugmansia reputation as a hallucinogen naturally attracted me as a teenager, although fortunately I didn’t find any to experiment with at that reckless age. Later, I did try smoking the leaves, since they were long listed in the U.S. pharmacopoeia as a remedy for respiratory problems, to arrest coughing.

They did arrest my cough somewhat, but by that time I knew that too much datura could also arrest breathing, so I was pretty cautious in my experiment (it tasted very bitter, even in smoke, which made me inclined to limit the experience even further). I have seen at least one young woman permanently altered for the worse from eating datura; I would never ingest it.

But I can admire its power through my nose and my eyes and those other senses all of us plant lovers use when we commune with green friends.  I can feel brugmansia’s power of death and resurrection spreading invisible fragrance through my house. That means a lot, this time of year.

In the evening, as it opens, it’s one of the sweetest and most gentle scents, a combination of jasmine and orange blossom and gardenia, blended gently with its own mellowing agent. In the morning, it smells faintly of rubber balloon.

I’m a little bit of a sucker for the nicotiana genus, and I also have a weakness for fragrant plants. Add to that that I like carrying on heirloom plants, and you’ll have the sum of why I chose to order ‘Cranberry Isle’, an heirloom flowering tobacco from Select Seeds. I received on of their typically bouncingly healthful plants which has since boomed several sizes larger.

Marilyn Barlow, founder of Select Seeds, was kind enough to answer my email asking for more on the origins of this “new” heirloom introduction (actually, re-introduction). But this plant may be a mystery wrapped inside an enigma surrounded by a riddle, because the only information Ms. Barlow has is that Cranberry Isle came from an old garden in Maine, and was rumored to have come from an actual, land-and-sea Cranberry Isle.

Cranberry Isle is a hybrid of Nicotiana. sanderae and Nicotiana. forgetiana. When I saw this info on a garden list, I wondered at first if N. forgetiana was a joke; background information is often lost and forgotten, especially with heirlooms. So far I haven’t been able to find out how old it is (I haven’t been able to find out where its parents come from, either. Very worrying.).

Until I looked it up, I thought one of the parents might be Nicotiana alata, as the flowers look so much like jasmine tobacco. To my nose’s memory (sounds like a beginner piano piece), the smell of Nicotiana alata is different; more straight-ahead, piercingly sweet, not the gently rounded bouquet Cranberry Isle has.

The backs of my Cranberry Isle’s flowers are rose, while the insides open white (with perhaps the slightest pink tinge; it’s hard to see in the dusk), but by morning have turned pale blush pink. I haven’t gotten the multicolor effect promised in the seed catalogue, but perhaps that’s something that comes with time. Or varies from plant to plant.

While ravaged by earwigs (one of the few bugs that isn’t put off by tobacco’s insecticidal powers), this flowering tobacco gamely kept growing. It started blooming about a month after I’d received it in its tiny mailer pot, and I can expect it to go awhile.  I don’t know how long, because I can’t find that information anywhere. I’ll just have to research the old-fashioned way: wait and see for myself. Or get info from other gardeners who have grown it - maybe that’s you?

The last time I wrote about cucuzzi, the edible gourd, I still hadn’t gotten any female flowers or fruits.

I do now. I went away for a few days. When I left, the biggest fruit was a few inches long, and no thicker than my finger.

When I got back, it looked like this:

The female flowers are a little different than the male ones; the petals are narrower, creating a kind of pinwheel effect. It’s a nice variation.

My cucuzzi didn’t really get going for a while. I did get a late start on my garden, what with one thing and another, and it could be that they don’t have quite as much sun as they would like (though I gave them one of the sunniest places I’ve got), or that I didn’t give them enough flower fertilizer to get them flowering sooner.

Or it could just be that they were in a mood. Plants are like that.

In any case, I’m going to be eating them soon, because cucuzzis are supposed to be harvested when they’re about six inches long. Since they are gourds, you don’t want them to  get mature. (Well, even if they were summer squash, you’d want to avoid that.)

As much as I want to see what they taste like–if they really live up to the great things people say about the flavor– I’m saving this first cucuzzi for seed. I’m not an expert at seed-saving, but one of the things I remember is that, if you want a plant to bloom earlier, it’s best to select seed from the first fruits that appear. And so far the main pleasures of cucuzzi have been in their exuberant viny growth, springy tendrils, and faintly scented evening flowers.

It’s okay. It looks as if I’m going to have more edible gourds in just a few days. Unless it freezes tonight.

Louise Beebe Wilder says that, on cloudy days, four o’clock flowers open early and stay open all day.  Gerard says that if the air is temperate, the flowers stay open all day and close at night. I’ll have to take their word for it: by the time it’s late enough in the summer for four o’clocks to bloom here, both rain and temperate air are long gone.

They have a tendency to loll and flop, and are fairly thirsty plants. On the other hand, they’ll come back nicely from water neglect, as I can personally attest, and the floppiness isn’t altogether bad if you’re growing them closely with other plants. You can kind of lay the plant out of the growth path of the ones they’re interplanted with. They will continue to bloom, upright or sideways.

A Canadian garden book says they’re supposed to grow only one to two feet tall, but the first one I ever saw was a wide round bush of at least three feet, and one of my plants that is flopping and growing sideways is getting to about that length. My Sunset Western Garden Book agrees with me: they grow to 3 or 4 feet. The likelihood is that hotter weather gets them to come on faster. But don’t lose heart if you live in a cool-summer climate, since they are reputed to grow, and flower prodigiously, in Canada and England. Maybe you’ll get to see their flowers open all day, to make up for shorter plants.

I’ve planted one of my four o’clocks in a container by the door, so that each day I can witness the miracle of new parti-colored flowers just by walking out the door. And each evening the flowers open, release their slightly-sweet pale lemon scent, and stay open until shortly after the sun hits them the next morning.

Gerard describes the scent as being sweet like narcissus, but it isn’t to my nose. This could be because of a difference in our senses of smell, or because of a difference in varieties of Mirabilis jalapa. David Squire says its scent is “fruity and sweet”, which is more like my reading.

A sense of smell is an evanescent thing, and the interpretations and associations we give each odor are entirely personal, though there may be many people who share the same feelings about a single scent.

Mirabilis jalapa is not the herb called jalap, which comes from the root of Ipomoea jalapa, or High John the Conqueror root. Gerard claims that he heard from someone that the roots could be used as a purgative, but he doesn’t appear to have tested this claim. I’m thinking there’s a possibility he mixed up the two; jalap has long been known as a powerful purgative, and Gerard heard the purgative report from someone in Italy. It’s easy to get information scrambled when it comes a long distance, as anyone who has ever played the party game “Whisper Down the Lane” (sometimes known as “Telephone”) can testify.

Mirabilis jalapa caused quite a stir when it arrived in Europe (and what is now the UK) from the Americas. Gerard spends about three pages going on about it in his Herball (approximately 1636).  He says that the seed was brought from Peru to Spain, and thence to the rest of Europe, and England.  Parkinson, a bit later, is still excited about the diversity of the colors, but only enough to go on for two pages.

Among his observations on the habits of Mirabilis jalapa is,  “And I haue often also observed that one side of a plant will giue fairer varieties than another, which is most commonly the Easterne, as more temperate and shadowie side.”

This is strangely unlike my own experience with four o’clock, which mulishly refuses to bloom for me unless it gets a fair dose of sun throughout the day. Maybe morning sun was enough for the eastern side of Parkinson’s plants.

The name Mirabilis jalapa reflects an older name, Mirabilis Peruana, which translates into one of its modern common names: Marvel of Peru. Belle-de-nuit (“beauty of the night”) was common name for it in France, at least as late as the 1930s, and apparently it goes as “Beauty of the Night” (in English) in at least parts of North America. In older times, it was also called Marvell of the World (nursery-grower hype seems to be a tradition that has come down through the centuries). HachalI was, supposedly, the Peruvian name for it. Other European names were  Solanum Odoriferum; Jasminum Mexicanum; Carolus Clusius; Admirabilia Peruviana. All of which goes to show what Linnaeus had to deal with a little later, when he started standardizing plant names.

Educated people of the time used Latin as a common tongue, which is why all these names are in Latin, and why Linnaeus chose Latin for his binomials. Unlike the Latin-speakers above, he made the astounding move of relating plant the names to the family the plants were actually in, instead of just using names that plants reminded him of, or names of people he wished to honor (as in Carolus Clusius). We do, of course, keep to the European tradition of naming plants after people, but now we use cultivar or species names for that.

It’s an interesting cultural custom. In many cases, the plants named after European people were already well-known by non-European people in the plant’s country of origin. While I think the people who bring plants from one country to another, often at much peril, deserve credit, this makes me uneasy. European culture does seem to have a propensity for putting a stamp on things and calling them ours. I am not sure why we feel so compelled to do this. Fear, probably.

Gardens and plants make my mind wander down lengthy and little-used trails.  But it always comes back to the plants, the landscape, and our connections with them.

References:

John Gerard, Gerard’s Herball: The Essence therof distilled by Marcus Woodward, from the Edition of Th. Johnson, 1636, Crescent Books, 1985

John Lust, The Herb Book,  Benedict Lust Publications/Bantam, 1974/1979

Steven R. Smith, Wylundt’s Book of Incense, Samuel Weiser, 1989

Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening in Canada, Reader’s Digest Association (Canada) Ltd., 1979

Sunset Western Garden Book, Lane Magazine and Book Company, 1967, 1973

Louise Beebe Wilder, The Fragrant Garden, MacMillan, 1932; Dover reprint 1974

David Squire (with Jane Newdick), The Scented Garden, Rodale, 1989

“The stalks toward the top are garnished with long hollow single floures, folded as it were into five parts before they be opened; but being fully blown, do resemble the floures of Tabaco, not ending in sharp corners, but blunt & round as the flours of Bindweed, and larger than the floures of Tabaco, glittering oft times with a fine purple or crimson colour, many times of an horse-flesh, sometimes yellow, sometimes pale, and somtime resembling an old red or yellow colour; sometime whitish, and most commonly two colours occupying half the floure, or intercoursing the whole floure with streaks or orderly streames, now yellow, now purple, divided through the whole, having sometime great, somtime little spots of a purple colour, sprinkled and scattered in a most variable order and brave mixture.” John Gerard, Gerard’s Herball, Woodward edition pg. 75-76

“…it is a pleasant plant to decke the gardens of the curious.” ibid, pg. 78

I have the kind of four o’clocks that are yellow-and-cream, in combinations of splashes, stripes, and dots.  Sometimes I get an almost totally yellow flower, and sometimes I get an almost-white one. A friend grows a yellow and red-purple version that looks like the last of Gerard’s descriptions of this variable plant.
The first four o’clock I  ever saw in the flesh was blooming in a fairly shady spot (an unusual thing for four o’clocks, I found out later), and had flowers in solid colors. But the same bush had fuchsia, white, and orange-yellow flowers on it.

For a few years, I tried growing four o’clocks from seed, having read the usual propaganda that they are easy from seed.

They may be, and I may be the only one who can’t grow them that way. Or perhaps my garden just wasn’t sunny enough. Or perhaps I put them in places where they didn’t get enough water. After a few years of this, I ordered tubers of four o’clock (yes, they are tuberous plants) from Brent and Becky’s.

Gerard preserved his roots by digging them up at first frost and storing them in a butter firkin filled with river sand, and putting them in a dry place until planting them out in March or April. Likely his winters were more severe than my own. We get frosts, even snow, but we very rarely have ground frozen solid. Myself, I just leave four o’clocks in the ground.  They obligingly return each late spring.

When I see the screwed-up buds about to unfurl, I breathe a sigh of relief.  It’s late enough in the evening to expect some coolness soon.

 Next post: more about four o’clocks

References:

John Gerard, Gerard’s Herball: The Essence therof distilled by Marcus Woodward, from the Edition of Th. Johnson, 1636, Crescent Books, 1985

John Lust, The Herb Book,  Benedict Lust Publications/Bantam, 1974/1979

Steven R. Smith, Wylundt’s Book of Incense, Samuel Weiser, 1989

Reader’s Digest Illustrated Guide to Gardening in Canada, Reader’s Digest Association (Canada) Ltd., 1979

Sunset Western Garden Book, Lane Magazine and Book Company, 1967, 1973

Louise Beebe Wilder, The Fragrant Garden, MacMillan, 1932; Dover reprint 1974

David Squire (with Jane Newdick), The Scented Garden, Rodale, 1989