Huanduj Brugmansia

Alistair Hay • Monika Gottschalk • Adolfo Holguín

If you’ve never bought a plant book before …

• This astounding book pays homage to one of the world’s most beautiful garden plants
• A horticultural, botanical and ethnobotanical tour-de-force: the first comprehensive monograph on this genus
• The three authors are key international experts and breeders
• Full cultural needs for a range of climates, especially the management of these plants through extreme seasonal
  cycles at high latitudes
• Detailed information on the creation, evaluation and selection of new varieties
• Revision of the botanical classification (an engrossing detective story for the botanists)
• Complete world register of 1800 cultivar names
• Fascinating and extensive introductory chapter by the lead author on the millennia-long use of brugmansias as the most powerful, immediate and dangerous means of triggering spiritual visions in South American shamanic practices. You will want to read this mature and balanced account more than once
• Almost 450 photos of the species in their native South America and of a large selection of the finest cultivars, many of them in gardens throughout the world: as you can see from the samples in this brochure
• Co-published by Florilegium and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, distributed for Kew in North America by the University of Chicago Press

Dr Alistair Hay is a retired Senior Research Scientist and Director, Botanic Gardens & Public Programs with the Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust, Sydney. A gardener from the age of three, his scientific interest in tropical plants was inspired by reading the work of the controversial botanist E.J.H. Corner as an undergraduate at Oxford. After graduating he lived in Papua New Guinea for several years before returning to Oxford and completing a doctoral thesis about tropical aroids, on which he has since published many papers. He has a large and not in the least botanical garden on the New South Wales South Coast, and a property in southern Colombia dedicated to the cultivation of rare indigenous Andean plants.

Monika Gottschalk is the world’s preeminent breeder and temperate climate grower of brugmansias with over 30 years experience. Her interest began in the 1970s but it was not until a degenerative eye disease cut short a promising career in management at the age of 36 that it changed from hobby to occupation. Initially mentored by one of the great pioneers, Mme Herta Blin, she has been raising new Brugmansia hybrids of the finest quality for more than two decades. Her garden in the Vogelsbergkreis in Hessen, Germany, is a magnet for brugmansia-lovers during the fleeting montane growing season.

Dr. Adolfo Holguín is the leading South American expert on brugmansias, involved with their study and cultivation for over 40 years. His first thesis was on the extraction and purification of the alkaloids, and he has collected brugmansias from throughout his native Ecuador and further afield. He has collaborated closely with the Herrenhäuser Gärten in Germany, famous for its work with this genus. He now works in a small chemical products company in Quito, and has a large brugmansia-filled garden at his home at Cumbayá.