AKA loco weed!

How can some­thing so attrac­tive be so evil? (rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, just check out the news lately). I posted this photo, taken on my beach wan­der­ings, a week ago, call­ing it the mys­tery flower and request­ing it’s name. My loyal read­ers were on it imme­di­ately. Turns out it is the extremely poi­so­nous jim­son weed, also known as devil’s trum­pet, hell’s bells, locoweed, stinkweed and jamestown weed (talk about demo­niz­ing a plant!). In humans, the symp­toms of poi­son­ing include delir­ium, bizarre and vio­lent behav­ior and severe amne­sia. Treat­ment almost always requires hos­pi­tal­iza­tion. It is also poi­so­nous to ani­mals but less so.

Inter­est­ingly enough, accord­ing to jim​son​weed​.org, “This small, poi­so­nous bush had long been used med­i­c­i­nally, crim­i­nally, and for recre­ational pur­poses through­out the world, long before the set­tlers at Jamestown came across it. It was used by thieves in India and Rus­sia, where they used a mix­ture of ground up seeds and water to inca­pac­i­tate and then rob their unsus­pect­ing vic­tims. A reli­gious cult in India used it to mur­der peo­ple, and the plant was used as a poi­son in Renais­sance Europe.”

This is also the flower that so inspired painter Geor­gia O’Keefe. That makes sense, as it flour­ishes in the New Mex­ico deserts where she painted. I will be going to the Life Guard sta­tion to turn in this offen­sive mem­ber of the plant com­mu­nity. It will not be planted in my garden!

Jim­son Weed by Geor­gia O’Keefe 1932

On the Web:

• Sat­ur­day, ⁸⁄₆: Con­tainer Gar­den­ing with native plants at Theodore Payne Foun­da­tion for Wild­flow­ers and Native Plants (www​.Theodor​e​payne​.org) under East Val­ley nurseries
• Sat­ur­day, ⁸⁄₆: Using Native Plants and suc­cu­lents in pots class at Nopal­ito Nurs­ery (under Ven­tura Nurs­eries) www​.nopali​tonurs​ery​.com
• Free jazz con­certs with admis­sion at Des­canso Gar­dens this month (www​.Des​can​sog​a​r​dens​.org)
• Mon­day, ⁸⁄₈: Cre­at­ing and keep­ing a sus­tain­able land­scape talk at San Diego Hor­ti­cul­tural Soci­ety meet­ing (www​.sdhort​soc​.org)
• ⁸⁄₁₀: Mys­tic flo­rals class (sounds pretty neat from descrip­tion) at Sher­man Library and Gar­dens (www​.slgar​dens​.org)
• Weidner’s Gar­dens in Encini­tas has a lot of fun pro­mo­tions going on right now..(www.weidners.com) San Diego Nurs­ery section