San Francisco Chronicle article

Well here it is. I love Brugmansias. I enjoyed writing this. Andrew

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/09/17/HOGOSENH3P1.DTL

The call of the angels' trumpet leads to lifelong fascination with showy plant
Andrew Glazier, Special to The Chronicle
Saturday, September 17, 2005 now part of stylesheet -->


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The first time I saw an angels' trumpet flower was in the early 1990s. It was growing over a fence in Berkeley. I stopped my bike and just looked at it for a few minutes because I couldn't identify it. I pride myself at being pretty good at identifying flowering plants, but this creature had me stumped.
The way the trumpet-shape flowers hung straight down kept me guessing. I gently held one in my hands and tilted it toward me. There was a mild, sweet fragrance. The flower was the color of orange sherbet. As I looked up the throat, I realized it was a nightshade plant in the solanaceae family. This is the family that includes tomatoes, potatoes, hot peppers, tobacco, petunias and datura, a roadside weed.
The angels' trumpet flower looks most like a huge datura flower. Anyone who's ever seen the Georgia O'Keefe painting of the datura blossom associates it with the desert. It stands upright and can be seen easily during a full moon. Angels' trumpets, or as they are correctly called, brugmansia, hang straight down or at angles and are found in the tropics.
I slowly pedaled away, making mental notes to return with the hope of gathering seeds from these flowers. A few weeks later, I returned. The plant was no longer flowering and there were no seed pods to be had. I snipped a cutting and rushed home to put it water with the hope of its growing roots. I placed it in a vase and figured it would take a week or two to begin rooting. Twenty-four hours later, the cutting had begun to swell where the water met the stem and little white bumps had formed where the roots would grow next. I immediately removed the plant from the water, put it in a 1-gallon pot with soil, watered it well and put it in a shady spot in the garden. Incredibly, less than 72 hours after cutting it from the mother plant, it was becoming erect again. While it did drop a few leaves, it appeared to be adjusting well.
I didn't find the name of these plants for a while; back then, I couldn't Google common names of plants to find their Latin names as I do now. I heard that the San Francisco Botanical Garden at Strybing Arboretum had some and, after searching the grounds, I found a number of huge specimens in the back of the gardens. I was shocked to see the variety of colors they came in: red, orange, yellow, white and peach. There were truly large flowers and some that were quite small. Some were large single flowers and some double flowers, one inside another. I also discovered seedpods, so I knew they could be grown from seed. Because the next plant sale was not soon, I was encouraged to volunteer, as a shortcut to obtaining seeds.
I met a worker named Don Mahoney who answered many of my questions about these plants: Why do they hang down when a related plant, datura, stood straight up? He explained brugmansia are tropical plants from areas of heavy rainfall. Any flowers pointing straight up would quickly be flooded. This behavior can also be seen in abutilons or, as they are commonly called, Chinese lanterns. They hang down but other plants in the mallow family, which they are from, stand upright.
I began to spend a few hours each weekend at the botanical garden and was able to buy cuttings of each of the varieties. Most grew well but I discovered that the smaller flowered ones, Brugmansia sanguinea and B. vulcanicola, were quite temperamental. I learned the hard way not to place them in full sun. Unlike most members of the solanaceae, they are not necessarily sun lovers. Brugmansia like rich, well-composted soil. I use tomato fertilizer occasionally to give them a kick-start, and I try to make sure they have ample organic matter around their roots.
I have had some success cross-pollinating different brugmansia but, until I purchased the book "Brugmansia and Datura: Angel's Trumpets and Thorn Apples" by Ulrike and Hans-Georg Preissel at the San Francisco Botanical Garden bookstore, it was hit-and-miss. When a cross is successful, seedpods of different shapes appear. Some are quite round and others elongated. The seeds have a corklike texture and are shaped like little puzzle pieces inside the seedpod. The seeds readily germinate in warm, moist locations, and because the plants are so easy to propagate by cuttings, the majority of varieties in the Bay Area may be the same. Germany has quite a few new hybrids available in a dizzying array of colors and shapes.
These plants, especially the single-flowered ones, look stunning with lights pointing upward at their base. The flowers glow in the evening. My favorite is 'Charles Grimaldi.' I set some lights at the base and pointed them upward and the flowers catch the light and look like paper lanterns with candles inside -- a display that impressed my neighbors.
All parts of a brugmansia plants are poisonous and people with small children should be cautious. Pets seem to know better than to eat the plants, and snails take a few bites and then move on. Spider mites are the one creature that likes brugmansia, and I use a brass nozzle sprayer to knock them off. If plants get heavily infested, they can be cut back aggressively and will sprout back soon after.
Brugmansia can get quite large. A cafe in the Lower Haight in San Francisco had one in its back area, which was at least 25 feet tall.
Illie Gaceu, a construction worker who volunteers at Strybing on the weekends, is an expert on brugmansia. Latin names roll off his tongue as he walks me through a quiet area in the back of the gardens, identifying plants out of bloom at a distance by leaf alone. He tells me that there are seven recognized species of brugmansia: B. arborea, B. aurea, B. insignis, B. sanguinea, B. suavolens, B. versicolor and B. vulcanicola. The last was loved by the famous Harvard botanist Richard Schultes, who was hiking on the Puracé volcano in Colombia when he stopped to observe the plant. Then the volcano erupted. Schultes credited the plant with saving his life by attracting him with its flowers.
Different things pollinate brugmansia. Hummingbirds pollinate some blooms during the day. Others blooms are white and fragrant and reflect the moonlight and are pollinated by moths or bats. Some brugmansia flower during lunar cycles, perhaps to be illuminated for pollinators.
In his home garden, Gaceu showed me two large and quite different brugmansia planted near each other. Between them is a perfect mix of the two. Its flower, though, will remain a mystery until next year.
For more info go to www.americanbrugmansia-daturasociety.org or www.abads.net.
E-mail comments to home@sfchronicle.com.
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