The foxgloves are big in my yard. Not as big or numerous as last year, but bigger than they’re supposed to be. They really love the soil in that corner for some reason. Digitalis babeyyy. Meanwhile my husband has acquired a datura plant, also known as the jimsonweed, thornapple, devil’s trumpet – a nightshade cousin dripping with psychoactive and deadly scopolamine.
Anyone remember “Back in the Saddle Again”? No, not that one. We’re not ridin’ into town tonight lord by the light of the moon, lookin’ for suki jo at crazy horse saloon. I mean the one out where a friend is a friend. Anyway, old Gene said the longhorn cattle feed on the lowly jimsonweed, and I say he’s a very bad cowboy if he’s letting that happen. Song is supposed to be happy, it should be like “longhorn cattle feed, keep ’em off the jimsonweed.”
My husband regaled me with funny and/or spooky passages from a subreddit about datura. Probably ended up there because I was questioning his estimation of risk vs aesthetics, like, you really want that back there? Go ahead and creep yourself out with the drug stories. High school fun.
As for the plant’s plantliness, it has allelopathic properties and likes to spread so he’s keeping it in a pot. No flowers yet, but we shall see. On the subject of the foxgloves, they’re fun to look at, but wildly productive with the seeds, and they take up a lot of space. I’d say it’s less like he’s gardening them and more like he’s allowing them to exist, for now. I’ve seen them running wild by the 320th / I-5 overpass into Federal Way. Maybe it’s an invasive plant’s world these days, and we’re just living in it.
–
Foxgloves are native here and we always get a few in the garden. I’m fond of them, if I’m in the right space they take me back to early childhood and being shown how the bells would make good gloves for a fox paw.
Datura are not native, but people do grow them in pots that can be taken under cover for winter protection. These days they do come with extensive warnings regarding their poisonous nature, but as they are pretty people do still grow them.
Brugmansia (ex Datura) are what are more commonly grown as patio shrubs (i.e. grown in pots and taken under cover for winter protection). Datura (usually Datura stramonium) are annuals which one occasionally sees in the wild in Britain; usually just one or a few plants, but I have on one occasion seen a field full of them. Both genera are quite nasty in the way of toxicity.
Once the kid was old enough to not chew on the shrubbery, I let the highly toxic stuff back in the yard. Foxgloves come up everywhere, get pulled up or moved until they settle into the landscape. Brugmansia pairs with monkshood, as monkshood leans through the trunks of the taller brugs. Brugs normally overwinters in a corner of the basement, but this past winter was warm enough I never had to bring it in.
for a second i was like, foxgloves nativ–? oh yes, i remember where u are. the real best use for a foxglove bell is to accommodate a bodacious bee butt. that’s pretty cute to watch.
seems like brugmansia and datura are like stalactites and stalagmites lol.
parents who grow brugs have kids who grow brugs. o_O
dun let the brug man zee ya, or issall oer but da crine