Datura

 The Garden of Nemesis has always attracted visitors, even before I began to open for “public” viewing. Usually, the visitor(s) hang around out front and gawk. I love gawkers. One day about ten years ago, I invited a curious woman in for a looksee. We got to talking and she offered me some seeds, which she later dropped off. I had no place to plant them at that time, so I serendipitously scattered them out on the front terrace between the street and the sidewalk. Good thing, as these were the seeds from the fruit of the prolific and invasive Datura plant. I do not allow this guy to grow in the garden proper. She had given me the wrong name for the plant, but a friend later correctly identified this vigorous grower.

Datura is sometimes called: Jimson Weed (named for the Jamestown Caper), Thornapple, Devil’s Apple, Devil’s Trumpet, Mad-apple or Loco weed. According to Robert Beverly in 1705, in 1676 a bunch of hungry colonists gathered Datura for a boiled “salad” and “ate plentifully”. They were delirious for days, making total idiots of themselves. One “sat stark naked in a corner, like a monkey,” and none of them remembered all their tomfoolery when they came back to themselves eleven days later. Datura is legal to grow in this country. It is also poisonous.

Many cultures have used Datura in religious rituals and it is now “used to treat asthma, and gastrointestinal problems, also aches, abscesses, arthritis, boils, headaches, hemorroids, rattlesnake bites, sprains, swellings, and tumors”. It is antibiotic, antispasmodic and narcotic. I have read where some cultures used it for anesthesia for surgery. If you have a waste site contaminated with TNT, grow it there and it will “transform it via nitroreduction,” in other words, it will clean it up.

Personally, I’m a little terrified to screw around with my nervous system by ingesting Datura; I just enjoy looking at the plant and pondering the irony of both natural and man-made Law.