During the recent ten years I have never seen so many Angel’s Trumpet flowers in our garden on a single day. Each of the clusters of these small trees is shimmering in pendant flowers of Brugmansia species. You can find these in thousands of gardens all over Guatemala: white, yellow, or pink flowers. Although I prefer to have wild flowers that are native, so far we have not found any native Datura to transplant to our garden. Datura flowers often stand up; Brugmansia flowers always hang straight down.
We have yellow flowers and white flowers; I show the yellow ones here. We thank Dr Miguel Torres for sharing cuttings of Brugmansia from his garden outside Antigua Guatemala.
The last three weeks it has rained almost every day; then came the annual canicula (a one week period of pure sun with no rain or heavy cloud cover). So this is probably what encouraged so many to flower.
Local bees absolutely love these flowers, but humans should not sniff, snort, swallow or otherwise use these flowers to eat or even to taste.
Written by Nicholas Hellmuth
Posted July 3, 2022
