The jimsonweed flower opens up every night as the sun goes down
This jimsonweed plant is one of the most interesting plants that has ever grown in my yard. To start off, the corollas of the plant twist shut during the day. Corollas are the collection of all the petals of a flower. That means that this pink to violet flower is twisted shut during the day and opens at night. Each evening, I would watch as the different flowers of the plant would slowly twist open as the sun began to set. They would emit a pleasant smell, but as we’ll learn throughout this post, I never got too close to smell them.
Jimsonweed belongs to the Solanaceae family of plants. This family is called the nightshades. It contains many plants that you are familiar with and that are used as food: chili peppers, tomatoes, potatoes, and eggplants. It also contains many plants that contain potent alkaloids with some of them being highly toxic. The scientific name of jimsonweed is Datura stramonium. It has other common names including thorn apple, devil’s snare, moon flower, hell’s bells, devil’s weed, stinkweed, locoweed, pricklyburr, false castor oil plant, devil’s cucumber, devil’s trumpet, and more rarely Jamestown weed. This last name comes from Bacon’s Rebellion, during which English soldiers consumed the plant and spent 11 days in altered mental states.
The jimsonweed plant has many distinguishing characteristics. It grows to be two to five feet tall. Its stem is pale yellow-green to reddish purple in color. The one that grew in my garden was distinctly reddish purple. As it grows, the stem will fork off many branches. At the forks a single leaf and a single flower will grow. After the plant has flowered—which it does throughout the summer—an egg-shaped seed capsule is formed. This can be anywhere from one to three inches in diameter and is covered in spines. When it matures, the seed capsule will open up into four chambers releasing dozens of small, black seeds.
Once I had identified what species of flowering plant this was, I was quick to remove it from my yard for good reason. All parts of the jimsonweed plant contain potentially dangerous levels of tropane alkaloids. Atropine, hyoscyamine, and scopolamine can all be found in the plant, and they are known deliriants, or anticholinergics. The plants are known to have psychoactive effects, but the risk of a fatal overdoes is high because of the 20:1 variation in the tropane alkaloids that are present between plants. The effects of ingesting the plant can take thirty to sixty minutes to take effect and the symptoms generally last one to two days. Some have reported cases that last as long as two weeks. Physostigmine can be administered as an antidote. Symptoms include blurred vision, coma, delirium, decreased bowel sounds, fever, hallucinations, ileus, memory loss, psychosis, seizures, and more. I wanted to make sure to remove this from my yard because it can be fatal to domesticated animals, like dogs.
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