All manner of horrible things are being indulged in these days (war in Europe, war in the Middle East, prices rising steadily and incomes not) so I am delighted to be able to write about this excellent news.
Two exotic species have been sighted on Denman Island. One is Jimsonweed. This popped up in the garden of a friend of mine. She didn’t know what it was so she corralled it off from her animals and watched. It turned into a plant with leaves similar to the nightshade family and then grew trumpet-shaped flowers that were white with purple lips. The flowers are fragrant and they bloom mostly at night. The flowers do not last long.
It picked up the name, Jimsonweed, during a rebellion in 1676 in Jamestown Virginia, Bacon’s Rebellion. Some English soldiers ate the spiky apples that are the seed pods of this plant and had a very nasty time of it. They were described as being in an altered state for eleven days but they survived.
The whole plant is toxic and we are warned to wear gloves while weeding it out. Eating it leads to hallucinations, tachycardia (very rapid heartbeat) and even seizures. It’s other names include thornapple and Devil’s trumpet.
Every year, some young people try to eat it for its hallucinatory effects but the symptoms often land them in hospital. The mnemonic for this poisoning is, “blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet, mad as a hatter and hot as a hare.” This does not sound like a good time to me.
Jimsonweed is native to Central America where it is used in traditional medicine for lots of different ailments. Hint: these people have had thousands of years to experiment with this very toxic plant. We have lots of safe herbs to make medicines from.
My friend thought a bird must have brought the seed in but it may have already been there as the seeds can lie dormant in the soil for years before some disturbance brings them to the surface and they sprout, kind of like broom.
Pretty flowers aside, you may not think the appearance of Jimsonweed among us is a good thing but it certainly led to something amazing. My friend though she had night-flying hummingbirds around her Jimsonweed flowers but they were moths.
Huge, beautiful Sphinx moths. I have long wished to see such a moth as they are very large, about the size of hummingbirds. Their bodies are pretty heavy for a moth so they have to beat their wings very fast to stay up. They can hover while feeding and zip off sideways, just like a hummingbird. I had no idea they could be found on our islands!
She had four of these beauties hovering around her Jimsonweed. The toxins in the flowers do not affect moths. One of the moths blundered into her house and she was able to coax it outside but got this photo of it first.
Had I but known we had such moths, I would have spent evenings on my porch, waiting for them to come to my Angel’s Trumpets. These plants have huge, showy, trumpet-shaped blooms that are scented at night to attract just such moths as the Sphinx moth.
All the different species of Angel’s Trumpets come from South America and they too are really toxic. Eat any part of the Angel’s Trumpet and you are looking at hallucinations, paralysis, tachycardia and even death.
Still, they are very pretty plants and are widely cultivated for their blooms. A friend gave me some cuttings one autumn and I stuck them in a pot of earth on the windowsill of my office and they were fine there until it was warm enough to pot them up and put them in the greenhouse. Once it was warm enough, in the late spring, I put them in larger pots on the deck and gave them lots of liquid fertilizer.
I had trouble with some critter eating the leaves but could find no caterpillars and finally just sprayed the leaves with a mixture of water and Ivory soap. That settled the hash of whoever had been dining on the leaves and I soon had a really good show of trumpets.
So, if you would like to have some Sphinx moths zipping around your garden next year, you will need to grow some large trumpet-shaped flowers for them. Denman Island’s Garden Club, now with some Hornby members, will meet at the United Church Hall at 1 pm on October 16. I will bring some Angel’s Trumpet cuttings as raffle prizes.
