Brugmansia - The Late Show

Brugmansia - the late show - 2
Originally uploaded by emagen


Brumansia flowering 12th December 2009. . . . Early winter gave no hint of what was to come! The photo shows a Brugmansia in full flower in mid December, above it are leaves of the banana Musa sikkimensis.
The reason why this plant is flowering so late is that I planted it out in very fertile ground and it spent most of the summer feeling very contented and thus only decided to flower very late in the year. I usually wedge these plants into small pockets of soil as I know this encourages flowering. In truth, this overwintered plant was so big that I could think of nowhere else to put it. It had 3 main stems each one about 2m tall..
As I said in an earlier post the late onset of winter caught me out. I had intended to dig it up, pot it and put it into the plastic greenhouse for winter. But it looked so good in full flower and the weather was so mild and by the time winter hit about 5 days later, I was about to drive to SW France for Christmas and New Year and had run out of time.
I did pot it up in January but I'm pretty certain that it was too late - it is quietly going mouldy in the greenhouse. I think it will sprout from the root and I will have to take long path of training it to produce tall stems.
It is worth training Brugmansias to grow as standard trees and it is quite easy. Their enormous fragrant flowers hang down so they are best seen from below or at least from the same level. To get extra height I cram one of the plants into the raised wall bed which gives it extra height and the lack of space for it to spread its roots encourage it to flower.

Overwintering in a compost heap

This almost describes how I get through  a winter!

But I’ve found that the compost heap is a good way of getting tender plants through the winter. One autumn I dug up a large Brugmansia but decided I had no space to keep it somewhere warm so I decided to dispose of it to the heap. As is my practice, I try and chop up any material destined for the heap, so I chopped up all the stems and roots that my secateurs could get through leaving just the stump and a few tough roots. The remaining stump was thrown on the heap along with all the chopped stuff. The following Spring, when delving into the heap, I found the stump looking very healthy with new roots and shoots. I planted the ‘stump’ which produced a very fine, flowering plant that summer.

Since then I’ve used the heap to overwinter other Brugmansias and rhizomes of ginger plants very successfully.

Of course, a compost heap produces quite a bit of warmth and seems to get the moisture level right.

 

Brugmansia at night

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