The Sacred Datura

We had an interesting “nature moment” a few years ago after we finished our home in Centerville. We'd been slaving away for months putting in the yard, moving (and removing) rocks, grading the dirt, digging trenches, laying sprinklers, regrading the dirt, and so on and so on.

I’d noticed a lot of interesting plants (weeds) growing up here and there, but two in particular struck me as unusual. They began growing in a bare patch of dirt out by the electrical boxes and they had dark, rigid leaves. They looked almost like a squash plant or something, only somehow more earnest, even ominous. Anyway, I left them alone to see what they would do. Within a few days, I could see long flower pods beginning to grow, the most mature nearly three inches long.

About that time I started wondering whether they were a desert plant with large white blossoms called a “Sacred Datura.” I knew next to nothing about them, but I’d seen photos of them in the Visitors’ Center at Great Basin National Park—luminous, white flowers that open like a trumpet. Curious, I read up on them, and found out that they are a desert plant that likes dry, disturbed soils. They bloom in the late evening, with each bloom lasting only one night, and they are pollinated by sphinx moths. Considered magical by Native Americans, the plants contain powerful toxins and hallucinogens. Some Indian Tribes used to brew a kind of tea from their leaves, which was then administered to young warriors as part of a coming of age ritual. Some of them saw visions; others likely died in the process. Even today, people occasionally die from trying to make (and drink) their own Sacred Datura tea.

The leaves in the photos I saw were a dead ringer for the plants in the yard, and so I wasn’t surprised at all when, a few days later, the first flower pod opened and sent out a long, tightly wound blossom. Later that evening, as twilight deepened into full darkness, the corkscrew unraveled quite suddenly, and there, sure enough, was the mystical bloom.

(Photo courtesy of Bill Barber on Flickr; available at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wdwbarber/2867088239/.)