Datura
Find what you love. Find it so you can pour yourself into it and nurture its growth as it nurtures yours. What I do with perfume and incense is what I love. Deeply. The materials are ever faithful, loving, kind, and passionate, even the poisons. Datura, for example, is necessary for some of the incense work I do, but I am ever careful and mindful when working with her. She is a giggling trickster, a games player, someone you have to understand on a spiritual level. Someone with whom I have had a struggle for years. She beckons lovingly but she also taunts and teases. She is an entity in whose company you can never rest easy. Just when you think things are calm and normal, datura flips a table and throws a handful of dirt into the air. When working with her, this is the energy you bring to that work. As startling and unpredictable as she is, I adore her for her spontaneity and lust for fun, for deep down in her bones, she is the most serious, speculative, healing, and divine being.
It is unfortunate that in the past few years she has been exploited so terribly.
I love daturas so much. D. meteloides naturalizes vigorously around here, and I have grown D. inoxia and wrightii as well. ... They are gorgeous, beautiful, bossy, sprawly, unequivocally assertive warrior goddesses & desert queens. Stramonium didn't wana grow 4 me. ... Which is fine because I think it has a rep for being a tricksier one of the sisters, and I prob had barely enough maturity to start developing a relationship w the mellower inoxia/ meteloides/ wrightii species complex as it was.
ReplyDeleteI think I may be taking a break from growing them this year while I develop my care systems and philosophies a bit further, but they are a patron saint for sure, and I know that I will grow and revere them in some capacity for the rest of my life.
.... Have you tried growing any of the Ferula clan? There are seeds of F. communis available via JLHudson (public access seed bank-- love: https://www.jlhudsonseeds.net/SeedlistF-G.htm) and I am tempted to try them in my highly ambiguous, rapidly changing zone 6/7ish... but I bet they would love you and your climate.
.... I recently acquired some of that rich, syrupy Afghani Galbanum resin from Apothecary's Garden, as well as some of the F. sumbul muskroot (&&&&++++ lol).... They are a revelation. I'm obsessed in love.... Not entirely sure yet where they are going with me, but it is a Somewhere, for sure, and I know that I will not be getting over it any time soon.
Their oniony-garlicky other cousins are super special too, and I'm still finding out how they play with others but think they are honestly very pleasing and magnanimous, as well as obvs very meta-spirituo-physically therapeutic. Thanks for causing me to notice them. :) <3
:) , <3
Dav
Hey Dav!
DeleteI love datura's attitude, actually, even though she hurts my feelings sometimes. Stramonium is what grows in abundance around me, literally everywhere, in vacant lots, fields, along the side of the road. I rarely see anyone intentionally cultivating them. I haven't had much luck growing her from seed in the past, so I harvest from the wild ones. A nearby friend has a farm and datura S. grows voluntarily everywhere there, away from the road, far from herbicides and pesticides. For a while, I carried a couple of thorn apples in my purse after harvesting from datura that grew along the edges of a river side park. Live dangerously, yeah?
I actually ordered the giant ferula from JL Hudson. I'll let you know how it goes.
Thank YOU for reading this odd little blog :)
j