One of my newest plants, I started this from seed in spring 2020. Several germinated and I’ve kept them moving along, not expecting flowers this first year and intending to winter them over in the greenhouse and see if I might be blessed with Devil’s trumpets in 2021. The biggest of the seedlings had other ideas, however, and threw a bud and flowered this week (July 15th). It was gorgeous to look at, but I never caught much of a whiff of any fragrance. However, I didn’t get out at night to check on it, so when the next flower opens, I’ll set some alarms!

The species, D. metel, has an interesting provenence. It is unknown in the wild and according to Wikipedia:

…it seems clear that D. metel is essentially a collection of cultivars and recent critical authors have found it impossible to recognise a wild type for the species. This view is supported by the tuberculate capsules found in D. metel (as compared with the spinose capsules of other species) and the retention of seeds on the placenta, at least in cultivars ‘Fastuosa’ and ‘Chlorantha’. Both of these traits suggest cultivar selection…The variants of D. metel have been widely grown as ornamentals over a long period of time…There is no evidence that the variants arose from horticultural plant breeding in the Old World…These facts taken together strongly suggest that D. metel was a well-established cultivated species with a range of forms in its place of origin and that these forms arrived ready-made in Europe.^[4]

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2020 might see me potting this plant on yet again to a bigger pot and feeding and watering it religiously in the hopes of coaxing more spectacular blooms from it. I’ll do the same with the other seedlings to see if they catch up and bloom, too, then I’ll tuck them in the greenhouse for the winter and hope they come back bigger and better in year two.