Brugmansia is a genus of seven species of flowering plants in the nightshade family Solanaceae. They are woody trees or shrubs, with pendulous flowers, and have no spines on their fruit. Their large, fragrant flowers give them their common name of angel's trumpets, a name sometimes used for the closely related genus Datura.
Datura and other members of Solanaceae, the gothically monikered nightshade family, are much more infamous than the bright and fragrant Brugmansia. Belladonna, mandrake, and henbane, solanaceous plants containing dangerous psychoactive alkaloids like those found in the angel’s trumpet, turn up poetically all over Western literature, from Shakespeare to witches’ spellbooks.
The intense psychoactive compounds derived from Brugmansia do have medical uses: hyoscine, also known as scopolamine, which is now usually synthesized artificially, is used to treat nausea and to stem saliva production.
