Now that both myself and my plants have thawed out, I can assess the freeze damage.  It is not a pretty sight around here as you can see by looking at this picture of one of my larger angel trumpets, brugmansia Coral Glow.    Fortunately it did not get nearly as cold as many forecasters had predicted.  The low temperature hovered around 29 for a couple of hours and briefly dropped to 28.  That is much better than the 24-26 that was forecast to be the low.Over the weekend I was able to assess ...

So much for getting a yellow double brugmansia for Christmas. The bloom is fully open now and it is white.  Darn that Grinch! The bloom is a nice healthy sized bloom with a fragrance so I'll keep it around for a few more bloom cycles to see what it does. The day after I shot the picture below it started getting a faint pink hue to it.  Unfortunately I accidentally snapped the bloom off as I was examining the inside of the flower.  Now it is time to play the waiting game as new buds are ...

One of the toughest parts of growing out brugmansia seedlings is waiting for the blooms to open.  Sometimes it takes weeks for the buds to open.  Of course the more you watch them, the longer it takes them to open.  With brugs, the dominant color is white.  For me this equates to about every three out of four seedlings I grow having white blooms.  This monster bud is playing with my mind right now.  I know it is going to at least be a double bloom and it appears to have a yellowish tint to ...

That's the story with this brugmansia.  It is a cross between Miss Caylie and Genevieve and is one of several plants I have growing from this cross.  Here's what the flowers looked like when the plant first bloomed in November. It was so ugly it almost ended up in the compost pile.  Knowing that the first blooms a seedling produces may not resemble the flowers the plant produces as it matures, I decided to let the plant stay for a couple more rounds of blooms.  Over the weekend the second ...

By Christmas I'll be encountering another major flush of blooms on my brugmansia plants.  Before I go crazy cross pollinating blooms I decided to take a pod inventory to see which of my earlier crosses actually took.  I was shocked to see that I had over 150 seed pods in various stages of development.  I only counted them if they were at least an inch or two long and fattening up.  I probably have another 50 that are still small and haven't made it past the stage where they could easily be ...

This was the only new seedling blooming this weekend.  It is a cross between Kleine App x Unknown and New Orleans Lady.  It is trying very hard to be a double as you can see by the second skirt still stuffed inside the bloom.  The peach color has deepened since I shot these pictures.Here's another picture showing the nice recurved form.

Brugmansia Delta Dawn was a vigorous grower for me and loved to show off her large over-sized yellow blooms.  During the couple of flushes she had this summer there were so many blooms that the branches were touching the ground.A couple of weeks ago I was ready to pollinate some of her flowers and I noticed what appeared to be stem blight, the scourge of brugmansia growers.Delta Dawn is now history.  I chopped her up, tossed her in the dumpster, and sanitized the garden tools used in the ...

That's my current dilemma as many of my brugmansia plants start their fall blooming cycle.  I've been anxiously awaiting the cooler weather to make it easier for my crosses to take.  This weekend I focused on my variegated varieties because the blooms were prime.  I'm hoping to find some type of variegation in a plant with a pink, yellow/orange or double bloom.  I know it is a long shot, but you never know. Here are a few of the many crosses I made:Sun Sport x Axel RoseSun Sport x MayaSun ...