Angel's Trumpet Brugmansia x candida

The nocturnal scent of Angel's Trumpet is remarkable, suddenly switching on at dusk and filling a conservatory with a fragrance that can be almost overpowering. I have read a story - probably apocryphal, but never mind - that in the plant's native South America mothers wheel their crying infants in prams under these plants because the fragrance is soporific and quickly pacifies them. This particular species is a sterile hybrid and can only be propagated from cuttings. I bought the original plant for £2.50 from Egglestone Hall gardens about twelve years ago and the one in the photo is a 6th. generation clonal descendant. Taking a  cutting every other year and providing a frequent high nitrogen feed produces a 2 metre-tall plant within two years that soon becomes too big for its pot and our small conservatory and must be propagated from cuttings again. Tonight the current incarnation has ten nine inch-long blooms open and the scent pervades the whole house .... it's been flowering since November and there are still plenty of buds to open. That original £2.50 was the bargain of the century.

Seen from below, the buds have this intriguing spiral twist just before they open fully.

Brugmansia, like many members of the potato family (Solanaceae) contains extremely toxic alkaloids which, in appropriate doses, have important medicinal uses .

Glory Lily Gloriosa superba (Colchicaceae)

This spectacular lily is a native of Africa, where it is the national flower of Zimbabwe, and also of India where it is the state flower of Tamil Nadu. It’s a climber, using its leaf-tip tendrils (see backing photo for the title panel of this blog) to cling to supports. If it’s left to scramble through other plants in a conservatory it will grow to a couple of metres tall and typically produces 5-6 blooms. The plant grows from an underground tuber and is easy to cultivate in a warm conservatory in summer, but you need to be careful to keep the tubers dry during winter, otherwise they rot off very easily. All parts of the plant are poisonous and the tubers particularly so, since they contain the toxic alkaloid colchicine (from which the family name is derived). Like many poisonous plants it has a long history of use in folk medicine and along with several related genera that contain colchicine it has been used to treat gout – see http://www.patient.co.uk/medicine/Colchicine.htm . In Africa and India there has recently been a resurgance in interest in extracting a broad spectrum of medicinally useful and antimicrobial compounds from the plant, even to the extent of growing it as a crop, but it’s those flame-like flowers that make it horticulturally interesting. It's often sold under the names flame lily, Gloriosa superba Rothschildiana or G. rothschildiana, and there are yellow-flowered cultivars available. Older literature places it in the plant family Liliaceae. One distinctive floral peculiarity is the way in which the stigma bends through 90 degrees and pokes out of the side of the flower. This is possibly an adaptation to pollination but there seems to be little information on the pollinators of this plant, other than that bumblebees and purple sunbirds (Nectarinia asiatica) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_Sunbird have been seen visiting it.

Flower viewed from below