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Cultivated Everywhere, Extinct in the Wild

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Cultivated Everywhere, Extinct in the Wild

Brugmansia is now an ornamental grown in gardens worldwide, and it is, as a wild plant, gone.

Every known species is considered extinct in the wild. All surviving forms are cultivated, propagated by cuttings, and many are hybrids or long-selected cultivars maintained by human hands. The likely explanation is that its seed dispersers were large mammals of the South American megafauna that disappeared, leaving the plant dependent on the people who had already been growing it. Like kava and salvia, it is a plant that exists because a tradition kept it.

That produces an odd modern situation. A plant that Andean specialists treat as dangerous enough to reserve for the most difficult work is sold in garden centres in temperate countries as a fragrant patio shrub, and poisonings among people who were unaware of what they had, or who sought it deliberately after reading that it was psychoactive, are a recurring feature of the medical literature. Reports of scopolamine being used criminally to incapacitate people, most associated with Colombia, are frequently exaggerated in popular accounts but not baseless.

The atlas records the plant because its ritual use is genuine and documented, and records the caution because every tradition that uses it does. Of everything this atlas describes, it is the one where the gap between traditional handling and casual availability is widest.

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