Datura Stramonium: A Rabbit Hole Trip

 

                                           Datura Stramonium: A Rabbit Hole Trip

 

It started innocently enough. A quest for rabbit proof flowers. But it rekindled a trip down a rabbit hole of memories, involving a different kind of trip.

 

Our neighborhood now has a burgeoning rabbit population. While my garden is protected by an electric fence, other plants not so protected are being decimated. In a trip to the garden center I discovered a beautiful flowering Datura Stramonium, an obvious addition to my Poison Garden, and definitely rabbit resistant. Datura is also known by the common names thornapple, jimsonweed, moon flower, hells bells, or devil's trumpet. It  is very poisonous, psychoactive, sacred, and associated with sorcery and witchcraft. Let's see what happens to the damned rabbits when they sample this!

But when I was 17, I mixed a batch of it and survived.

I made a tea from Asthmador Cigarettes, available without prescription at the local pharmacy.  

 

 The cigarettes consisted of a mixture of belladonna and datura stramonium powder. Before the advent of inhalers, it was one of the few treatments for asthma. I used cigarettes rather than the plants because the package had the percentage of active ingredients allowing for dosage calculations, using my physician father’s Merk’s Manual. Fortunately, and probably luckily, I got it right and didn't kill my friends.

The tea was truly a witch’s brew, dark and bitter. After about an hour I started feeling a bit dizzy, so I took to my bed.  Then I started experiencing vivid, lucid, direct-able dreams/hallucinations throughout the night. I could see how witches could imagine flying about. A peculiarity was I didn't disconnect from my motor functions, so I found myself flailing about in the bed. The next morning, I received a panicked call from a participating friend: "I can't see! Is that normal?" Fortunately, I was familiar with  " Datura ingestion can cause blurred vision due to dilated pupils (mydriasis). This effect is linked to the plant’s content of tropane alkaloids, which have strong anticholinergic properties.”

The overall experience was very interesting but never repeated. Thus far.

Wick Hunt 

                                                               Dancing Flies

 

 

I was relaxing on the front porch, awaiting another sweet spring sunset. I noticed small flying insects yo yoing together up and down in a beam of sunlight. Intrigued, I googled “flying insects dancing up and down in sunlight”: "Dancing Flies".

It seems the males gather in competition to attract females. They tend to be attracted to some subtle landmark, such as a branch or object on the ground. Little more is known about these dancers, as they have no known economic impact. However, most of the numerous species seem described as predatory, both in larval and aerial forms. Charmingly, males are said to offer females gifts of cocoons containing a tasty insect. Less so as occasionally they offer an empty cocoon. Aphids and other tiny insects are thought to be prey. I wonder, could they be useful as tiger mosquito control?

They certainly seem eager, or even frantic, as some insect’s life spans are measured in hours. Interestingly, many of the species are associated with aquatic features, of which we only have my diminutive pond in back, and Shenk’s branch way below.

Certainly, the bobbing, swirling patterns they make are endlessly mesmerizing.