A few days ago I have noticed something rather strange in one of Datura innoxia beds… For those who haven’t seen my datura Instagram posts, I have 4 flower beds growing Datura innoxia from seeds that I grew and collected. It all started with a rogue D. innoxia grew out of some discarded seeds in a flower bed that was meant for composting dog poop. That plant grew beautifully and produced an abundance of seeds. As an experiment, I tossed the seeds from this “dog poop-grown” datura into the other dog poop-filled beds. Those seeds germinated and grew amazingly, even withstood some crazy cold weather we had earlier this year. Currently all flower beds are filled with HUGE Datura innoxia bushes… I lovingly call this crop of D. innoxia my “dog poop daturas”…

Back to the strange discovery… Instead of leaves about the size of my palm, there are a few clusters of much smaller leaves, growing rather densely together, right next to the “normal” Datura innoxia plants in one of the flower beds. As you can see below, the leaves on the left are what Datura innoxia leaves look like normally. The cluster of dense, small leaves on the right grows out of a plant that is right next to the plant with “normal” leaves. Both plants share the same flower bed.

At first I thought maybe some random seeds of a completely different kind of plant had gotten into the datura flower bed and had started growing, so I tool a closer look, tracing the stems from which the clusters of small leaves are growing. I saw several unripened and ripened (exploded) seed pods on the stems that are definitely datura, and the seeds from the opened seed pods are also of datura.

Upon even closer inspection, I noticed a peculiar “rosette”… In all my years of growing multiple species of datura, I have never seen anything like this… This “rosette” looks almost like a flower, but it consists of just leaves.

I also found what might be a developing flower bud that looks, again, very different from the normal datura buds… Normally datura buds are long and skinny, shaped like fingers with pointed tips; they only start to “plump up” as they are about to bloom. This strange-looking bud takes on almost a “lantern flower” shape; it reminds me somewhat of ground cherry (Physalis pruinosa) which also belongs to the same nightshade family Solanaceae as datura.

There were a couple of spent flowers on this unusual plant, and I pulled the wilted petals off to reveal this and this —

They certainly look like datura seed pods at the beginning stage of development. You can even see some of the signature “spikes” on the one on the right.

Have you seen anything like this, or any other form of mutation in datura? If you have, I would love to hear about your observations! Please let me know in the Comments…

Meanwhile, I will continue to monitor this particular plant. There are a few new shoots coming out of the soil, and I am not sure if they come from the same root or if they are individual plants. It is important to note that I have not observe this kind of mutation in my other datura beds. The rest of the datura bushes are growing normally. The datura seeds I threw into these bed are all from my own plants that grow in other locations on my farm, and I have not seen this kind of mutation in those locations either. Even “rogue” daturas that popped up in all other areas do not seem to show any kind of mutations.

I will post updates later!