Datura discolor (desert thorn-apple)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Datura discolor, photographed by Robin White — fig. a Robin White, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-21 / obs. 199451543

Datura discolor, photographed by Reid Hardin — fig. b Reid Hardin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179779357

Datura discolor, photographed by Mike Ostrowski — fig. c Mike Ostrowski, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 179187517

Datura discolor, photographed by Bill Levine — fig. d Bill Levine, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 178260146

Datura discolor, photographed by Henrik Kibak — fig. e Henrik Kibak, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 179464829

Datura discolor, photographed by lchaney — fig. g lchaney, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 173542679

Datura discolor, photographed by Dan Horowitz — fig. h Dan Horowitz, CC0 1.0 / obs. 173053537

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 9 botanical countries

Native distribution of Datura discolor, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Arizona	ARI	NORTHERN AMERICA
California	CAL
Mexico Central	MXC
Mexico Gulf	MXG
Mexico Northeast	MXE
Mexico Northwest	MXN
Mexico Southeast	MXT
Mexico Southwest	MXS
Honduras	HON	SOUTHERN AMERICA

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 898 in flower of 1,566 examined

46%

47%

46%

47%

60%

47%

70%

73%

63%

83%

77%

60%

Proportion of examined Datura discolor in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	107	234	46%	39% to 52%
Feb	127	270	47%	41% to 53%
Mar	122	265	46%	40% to 52%
Apr	36	77	47%	36% to 58%
May	9	15	60%	36% to 80%
Jun	8	17	47%	26% to 69%
Jul	7	10	70%	40% to 89%
Aug	16	22	73%	52% to 87%
Sep	40	63	63%	51% to 74%
Oct	93	112	83%	75% to 89%
Nov	198	256	77%	72% to 82%
Dec	135	225	60%	53% to 66%

Peak flowering in Oct. Each bar is the share of Datura discolor observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 898 of 1,566 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 1 synonym

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Datura thomasii Torr.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.