[ Lost in the Landscape ]

unfurling datura

Only about five min­utes elapsed between the first and sec­ond of these pho­tos of the unfurl­ing buds of sacred datura, Datura wrightii. I had no idea how quickly these things opened in the fad­ing evening light as they get ready for their night­time pol­li­na­tors. Stand too close to these mas­sive open­ing buds and you could almost get hurt!

There are times I’m sorry you can’t con­vey hover the inter­net how some­thing smells. This is one of them. These mas­sive eight to nine inch flow­ers can pump out so much scent every moth in the neigh­bor­hood comes for a visit. I usu­ally think humans and insects don’t have an awful lot in com­mon. But we def­i­nitely share an attrac­tion to this flower’s amaz­ing scent.

That’ll be the next photo project: set­ting up the tri­pod again in the dark, wait­ing for the moths, as I get intox­i­cated on the scent of the flowers…

April 29 2010 | Categories: my garden • photography | Tags: Datura wrightii • sacred datura • toloache | 11 Comments »

reclamation

The house behind us has a back fence that is about fif­teen feet behind our rear fence. Between the two is a no-man’s-land of unmain­tained ice­plant, ivy and what­ever else has escaped from the adja­cent gar­dens. In some neigh­bor­hoods this might be the loca­tion for a back alley. But with lot of the back house ris­ing six feet over ours, the land is too sloped to accom­mo­date much more than a nar­row con­crete cul­vert to drain the slope behind us and keep the infre­quent rains from inun­dat­ing all of us below.

We have a gate that leads into this space of ambigu­ous own­er­ship, but I’d never spent much time back there until a recent project to repair the fence.

I looked with con­tempt at the thick mat of ice­plant. Botan­i­cal shag car­pet­ing, I thought. Every ignored space in town is cov­ered with it. It does next to noth­ing to pro­vide habi­tat for the local fauna. Although it’s often planted to sta­bi­lize a slope, its weight can actu­ally pull the slope down more than hold it in place. Yes, it’s very drought-tolerant, and it’s ser­vice­able in some sit­u­a­tions. But the plant for me usu­ally rep­re­sents a colos­sal fail­ure of the imag­i­na­tion. We can do bet­ter than this.

I just hap­pened to have two pots of seedlings of the native sacred datura, a.k.a. toloache, a.k.a. Datura wrightii. The plant eas­ily grows six or more feet across, and I real­is­ti­cally had no space for it in the gar­den around the house. The light­bulb over my head came on.

It’s amaz­ing what ten min­utes with a trowel, a water­ing can and two pots of plants can accom­plish. In this sec­ond photo, lower right, is one of the datura seedlings that I inserted into the thatch under the iceplant.

I must admit that after plant­ing them I for­got to water them for almost a week of dry weather well into the eight­ies. Expect­ing to see car­nage, I was sur­prised to instead see the plants look­ing at least as happy as they were in their seed pots. I gave them another drink of water, but that may be all they’ll require from here on out. Start­ing next spring, I’m hop­ing to bee able to see their amaz­ing morning-glory flow­ers from my deck, unfurl­ing at dusk to greet the night.

From my last walk in the local wilds I came home with a nap­kin folded around the seeds of another plant I pre­vi­ously didn’t have room for. I’m thrilled. I’ve got a whole new plot to garden.

November 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: Datura wrightii • drought-tolerant landscaping • guerrilla gardening • native plants • toloache | 2 Comments »

toloache

In the local canyons, this time of year brings about the spec­tac­u­lar flow­ers of the sacred datura, Datura wrightii. The low, mound­ing bushes grow two to three feet tall and eas­ily twice as wide, and are cov­ered from dusk to mid-morning with immense white trum­pets, eas­ily eight inches across, often flushed with pale lavender.

Photo by Dlarsen, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons [ source ]

This is one of sev­eral species of the genus that has been called toloache in Mex­ico. It’s in the night­shade fam­ily, and like other mem­bers of the genus Datura, the plant is as toxic as it is spectacular.

Even though it’s highly poi­so­nous, some Native Amer­i­cans used the plant as part of a cer­e­mony mark­ing the pas­sage of a child to an adult. From the Wikipedia: “Among the Chu­mash, when a boy was 8 years old, his mother gave him a prepa­ra­tion of momoy to drink. This was sup­posed to be a spir­i­tual chal­lenge to the boy to help him develop the spir­i­tual well­be­ing that is required to become a man. Not all of the boys sur­vived [my emphasis].”

On my recent pre-dusk hike through our local Los Peñas­qui­tos Canyon Pre­serve all the buds on the numer­ous toloache plants were tightly furled when I arrived.

But by the time I left, less a half hour before sun­set, the flow­ers buds were loos­en­ing. Had I stayed an hour longer I would have been able to view the fresh flow­ers in the last glow of day­light like an intox­i­cat­ing evil wel­com­ing the night.

Here you can get a sense for how large these flow­ers will be.

Despite its bad press this is one of our local plants that I’ve been eying to add to the gar­den. The only thing the cat shows any inter­est in are plants that look like grasses or cat­nip, and there are parts of the yard no small child could get to. Besides, I’ve already got a num­ber of toxic plants in the garden–oleanders, toma­toes and other night­shade cousins.

In addi­tion to hav­ing amaz­ing flow­ers, this datura requires no added water dur­ing the long dry sum­mer. Noth­ing this spec­tac­u­lar can make that claim.

Speak­ing of poi­so­nous plants, last week’s New York Times had an arti­cle on the Duchess of Northum­ber­land. She’s in the process of build­ing a mod­ern annex to grounds that were designed by Capa­bil­ity Brown, the land­mark British land­scape designer from the eigh­teenth cen­tury. Tra­di­tion­al­ists are not happy. “They said I am to gar­dens what Imelda Mar­cos is to shoes,” the Duchess is quoted. In her project one of the fea­tures is the Poi­son Gar­den, which the arti­cle describes as “a spooky fenced-off area with about 100 vari­eties of toxic plants, as well as cannabis and opium poppies.”

I bet this duchess’s gar­den par­ties will be pretty inter­est­ing affairs…

July 23 2008 | Categories: gardening • plant profiles | Tags: Datura wrightii • drought-tolerant landscaping • ethnobotany • in bloom • native plants • poisonous plants • sacred datura • toloache | 2 Comments »