You can buy various varieties of Datura through garden catalogues. A lovely one, D. stramonium, grows wild here in the Ozarks.
This plant isn’t popular with livestock owners as it is poisonous. Another reason to avoid it is its seed production. If you grow one this year, you will have a hundred or more next year.
In a good location and year, these Datura plants get four feet tall with many sturdy branches. Each branch has tufts of large leaves and lots of flower buds.
Since the flowers are lovely white trumpets, I leave a few around the workshop area. The rest succumb to the mower.
Other enemies attack any I miss. Flea beetles riddle the leaves with holes. Other insects come and go, usually escaping before I get close enough to see what they are.
Last year there was a huge plant growing in the barn lot next to the fence. The goats ignored it completely. The plant does have a rank odor when you are close to it and the goats don’t seem to like that. Poisonous plants and animals often advertise themselves to ward off nibblers.
After frost, I cut the plant down as it had a three inch trunk and dragged it out to a brush pile in the pasture. It had lots of thorn apple seed pods on it.
This year I have a Datura colony around the brush pile. These plants are short as the grass resents the competition. They are retaliating by covering themselves with flowers every evening.
Datura is a night bloomer pollinated by moths. Big sphinx moths home in on the flowers as soon as they open. One variety of sphinx moth then lays hornworm eggs on my tomatoes.
There are very few hornworms on my tomatoes in spite of this abundance of moth food. This might be due to wasps as these very useful insects need protein for their larvae. At least one variety attacks young, soft caterpillars like hornworms.
So I get to admire the lovely Datura blooms without a hornworm infestation.
