I'm a colder zone than you, but here in zone 6, I have a potted Brugmansia that I bring into my basement every winter. I brought it in about a month ago, and it's now flowering and making a great perfume scent in my basement. In fact, it only seems to flower when I bring it inside. Maybe the summer heat is too hard on it, even though it gets a lot of shade out on my deck. What is the normal flowering season for these? I got it from a friend a little over a year ago, and this is its second winter inside. No experience with them before that.

Black stem? Dat. Lighter Green stem? Brug Dark purple veins on leaves? Dat Lighter green veins, on underside of what is probably a smooth leaf? Brug Sharp HARD serrated dark green leaf on a black stem? Dat Serrated on a lighter green leaf, a yellow type of brug. Non serrated leaf? Pink, peach, orange or white Brug. Cranky when repotted? Dat And I do mean cranky, they DON'T like their roots disturbed. I never knew that. They drop ALL their buds if you jostle the roots when you repot. Gotta slip them out of one pot, and slide them into another without messing up the root ball. . .man they can be b*tchy. . . . Didn't care abouut being repotted? Brug. . . .

The "standard" you refer to is because Brugmansia used to be called "Tree Datura" - they thought it/they were the same as Datura but with a different/larger growth form. They are not. Whether or not you pinch off side shoots or not is a matter of preference. If you are wanting the "standard" and aiming for a tree-form, pinch away. If you want the ability to have more more branches to cut and root for more plants, don't pinch them off - let them get bigger and woody, then cut/prune them off and root them - even while you can continue to let the top develop and - as karyn1 said, "Y" because that has to happen (unless your plant came from a post-Y cutting that was rooted) - and still, in the end, get your "standard". Or you might choose to allow it to grow in bush-form. I'd go with the best of both by allowing side shoots and growth, later pruning to root cuttings, and still all the while working towards the tree-form. HOWEVER, I have several in my meager collection that I have worked towards the tree-form while harvesting older side-growth to propagate, and time and again those particular specimens have "shown me" that they don't want to be tree-form, they want to be bush-form or "clumping" after a fashion - by sending up a new, stout shoot from the rootstock/beneath soil level. Then others are completely happy being "trained" with singular, vertical growth. There's a heck of a lot more difference between Datura and Brugmansia than growth habits. Did your Datura-from-seed bloom change from white to white with purple, a tint, or any striping, or has it remained white for the duration/until it was/is spent? Some go through gradient colour changes, others don't - and not knowing what species of Datura seeds you got and a whole bunch of environmental factors plus all the stuff "not registered" like sheer fluke. But if it continues to only bloom white and you paid for purple - I would raise so much 7743 with the eBay seller - BECAUSE Datura spp. self-pollinate and while they are OP, the fact of the matter remains that even for those of us who effort to manually cross-pollinate for controlled pollination & trial, the result is more frequently failure to successfully cross-pollinate and still ending up with a self-pollinate bloom and subsequent seed pod. In other words the seller can't hide behind a statistically unlikely cross-pollinated bunch of seeds as an excuse for why they are all white instead of purple - they either mixed up their own seeds on ID or they were misrepresenting the seeds. Sorry, unethical Brugmansia and Datura sellers really get under my skin and make all Brug & Dat fanciers look bad. Grah!

I run a booth at our local flea market where I sell home grown plants from my garden. Last year I sold a lot of datura, next year I will begin offering brugs also. Most of the folks that bought the daturas were imigrants from Mexico or South America and they seemed to want these plants for recreational drug use - they would snicker and ask me in a whisper if I "knew" what to do with these plants. I told them that I fully understood what these plants were capable of and that is why I constantly referred to them as the deadly/toxic/poison plants. But that I also grew them in my garden because you got a lot of plant from a tiny seed by the end of the summer - plus they attract the kinds of moths I enjoy. I explained the risks and the people that didn't know anything about them were scared off of them. Tomato and Potato leaves are just as poisonous. I also contemplated sticking a million cuttings of the brugs but now I think I will take only so many cuttings every two weeks and work the plants in groups rather than have to deal with a thousand cuttings at one time. I can only take of so many seedlings, I can only transport so many plants and I can only sell so many plants - no sense in going over board with it. I plan on working with groups of 30 cuttings at a time. Around here brugs will sell for as low as $5 in a 1 gallon pot - they can be from 1 to 3 feet tall and sometimes blooming. They are very popular and can be easily overwintered under a pile of mulch so most folks have seen them. My state only charges $6 for what's called a Nursery Dealer license if your property is less than 5 acres. This allows you to buy in liners and grow them out or simply buy in wholesale stock and resell it at retail prices. Other licenses require that you maintain the stock for at least one season on your property. My state also doesn't require a sales tax permit or tax number nor the collection of sales tax for businesses selling live plants. Due to this there a ton of dealers selling perennials of annuals in the area. Only a few of them work from the large flea market (which is fine by me), it has the biggest crowds consistantly throughout the year. Even with all this good news I only make the equivalent of a part time jobs income doing this - so this isn't something that will make you rich.