Tropicals & Tender Perennials: What's the Best Source for Brugs?, 0 by mainfrog

mainfrog wrote:
zanusi:
Daturas and Brugmansias are often incorrectly applied, even by some growers and nurseries. Daturas (Devil's Trumpets) are annuals. Trumpets are smaller than face upward from a short, shrubby, sprawling shrub. Seed pods often a spiny ball. Brugmansias are perennial and grows as a shrub or small tree (although out here in California I've seen trees as tall as 20 ft and just as wide). Trumpets are larger and hang, some straight, others at an angle like peeling church bells. Seedpods look like chili peppers, some roundish, most elongated. The leaves on the daturas are foul smelling when brushed. Brugmansia leaves are not.
Even though your seeds are labeled datura, they MIGHT be brugmansias, because datura was a term applied to both, until they were separated by characteristics and the upright growing, hanging trumpet was re-identified by botanists as brugmansias. For more information go to my webpage, http://www.tree-frog.net Also check out ABADS website American Brugmansia and Datura Society. In Attached photo rows 1 and 2 are brugmansias, row 3 are daturas. There are many more varieites of each.

By-the-way: Unless you intend to grow these plants indoors, both are frost tender and will not survive your infamous Chicago winters (I'm a Chicagoan that years ago fled your weather in favor of balmy California).