Garden Alphabet: Datura from Santa Cruz Island

Garden Alphabet: Datura from Santa Cruz Island

Granted, Datura (Jimson Weed) isn’t something that everyone would want or have in their garden, but I have always found its flowers to be quite beautiful. Datura is a California native and this one was growing on Santa Cruz Island, one of the Channel Islands, which we visited yesterday, June 1, 2013. I highlighted a related plant, Brugmansia, in an early segment of Garden Alphabet.

Datura

“Datura is a genus of 9 species of vespertine flowering plants belonging to the family Solanaceae. They are known as angel’s trumpets, sometimes sharing that name with the closely related genus Brugmansia, and commonly as daturas. They are also sometimes called moonflowers, one of several plant species to be so. Its precise and natural distribution is uncertain, owing to its extensive cultivation and naturalization throughout the temperate and tropical regions of the globe. Its distribution within the Americas, however, is most likely restricted to the United States and Mexico, where the highest species diversity occurs.

Some South American plants formerly thought of as Datura are now treated as belonging to the distinct genus Brugmansia[1] (Brugmansia differs from Datura in that it is woody, making shrubs or small trees, and it has pendulous flowers, rather than erect ones). Other related genera include Hyoscyamus and Atropa.” . — Wikipedia.org

Previously in Garden Alphabet: