Skip to main content


Angel's trumpets (Brugmansia)

Cubung gunung or angel's trumpets or Brugmansia are plant genera in Solanaceae, woody shrubs, large flowers that are pendulous and fragrant at night. Seven officially recorded species in this genus are Brugmansia arborea, Brugmansia aurea, Brugmansia insignis, Brugmansia sanguinea, Brugmansia suaveolens, Brugmansia versicolor and Brugmansia vulcanicola.

The Brugmansia species contain tropane alkaloids of the type that have lethal nighthade toxicity. Large bushes or small trees, semi-woody stems, multiple branches and 3-11 m tall. The leaves are arranged along the stem, 10-30 cm long and 4-18 cm wide and often covered with fine hair.

Dlium Angel's trumpets (Brugmansia)

The flowers are large, pendulous, trumpet-shaped, 14-50 cm long and 10-35 cm wide, white, yellow, pink, orange, green or red. Most have a strong aroma at night to attract pollinator moths. Brugmansia sanguinea is not fragrant but red flowers are favored by hummingbirds.

Cubung gunung contain important alkaloids including scopolamine, hyoscyamine, and atropine which have been proven as medical values for spasmolytic, anti-asthmatic, anticholinergic, narcotics, and anesthetic properties, although many of these alkaloids have been synthetically synthesized.

Angel's trumpets are traditionally used in many cultures in medical preparation and as an entheogen in religious or spiritual ceremonies. Traditional external uses include treating aches and pains, dermatitis, orchitis, arthritis, rheumatism, headaches, infections, and as anti-inflammatory.



Very low internal use includes treatments for stomach and muscle diseases, decongestants, to excrete parasites and as a sedative. Traditional healers use Brugmansia for initiation, divination, and black magic rituals.

Kingdom: Plantae
Clade: Angiosperms
Clade: Eudicots
Clade: Asterids
Order: Solanales
Family: Solanaceae
Subfamily: Solanoideae
Tribe: Datureae
Genus: Brugmansia
Species: Brugmansia arborea, Brugmansia aurea, Brugmansia insignis, Brugmansia sanguinea, Brugmansia suaveolens, Brugmansia versicolor and Brugmansia vulcanicola.

Popular Posts

Thomas Sutikna lives with Homo floresiensis

BLOG - On October 28, 2004, a paper was published in Nature describing the dwarf hominin we know today as Homo floresiensis that has shocked the world. The report changed the geographical landscape of early humans that previously stated that the Pleistocene Asia was only represented by two species, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens . The report titled "A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia" written by Peter Brown and Mike J. Morwood from the University of New England with Thomas Sutikna, Raden Pandji Soejono, Jatmiko, E. Wahyu Saptomo and Rokus Awe Due from the National Archaeology Research Institute (ARKENAS), Indonesia, presents more diversity in the genus Homo. “Immediately, my fever vanished. I couldn’t sleep well that night. I couldn’t wait for sunrise. In the early morning we went to the site, and when we arrived in the cave, I didn’t say a thing because both my mind and heart couldn’t handle this incredible moment. I just went down

Elephant bell gourd (Trichosanthes tricuspidata)

Elephant bell gourd ( Trichosanthes tricuspidata ) is a plant species in the Cucurbitaceae, stems grow elongated to propagate or climb, many branches, cylindrical in shape and green in color. T. cochinchinensis has stem tips or branches that twist to attach themselves to a support or other plant. It grows to climb to cover a support, usually on another plant, up to several meters and creeps along the ground to reach another support. Arrow-shaped leaves, split base, sharp apex and two wings at an acute angle, have many veins ending at a sharp edge, green and have a long petiole. Single flower is white. The fruit is round to oval, ends with a tail, young green and turns red with maturity, thin skin, thick flesh and reddish yellow, has a short stalk and hangs. The seeds are in the middle of the fruit. Seeds are white, oval and flat. Black coated seeds. Elephant bell gourd grows wild in primary and secondary forests, agricultural land, roadsides, watersheds, especially on slopes, damp a

Yellow fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) use thermal infrared to navigate hosts

NEWS - Aedes aegypti transmits the viruses that cause dengue, yellow fever, Zika and other diseases every year, while Anopheles gambiae transmits the parasite that causes malaria. Their capacity to transmit disease has made mosquitoes the deadliest animals. Moreover, climate change and global travel have expanded the range of A. aegypti beyond tropical geography. The mosquitoes are now present in subtropical climates that were previously unheard of just a few years ago. Male mosquitoes are harmless, but females need blood for egg development. There is no single cue that these insects rely on to feed; they integrate information from many different senses across a wide range of distances. " A. aegypti very adept at finding human hosts. This work provides a new insight into how they achieve this. Once we got all the right parameters, the results were clear and undeniable," says Nicolas DeBeaubien of the University of California at Santa Barbara UCSB. The researchers added

Nactus simakal, gecko evolved in geomorphological habitat of Dauan Island

NEWS - Researchers report a new species of Nactus simakal that lives in a boulder-strewn habitat with deep crevices on Dauan Island in the northern Torres Strait. The Torres Strait Islands lie between Cape York Peninsula, north-eastern Australia, and the southern coast of Papua New Guinea and are rare in gecko biodiversity. The vertebrate fauna of the islands is a mix of Australian and New Guinean species with only two endemic species described to date. Conrad Hoskin of James Cook University in Townsville and colleagues describe the new species as highly distinctive based on ND2 mtDNA genetics and morphologically on its slender, elongated striped pattern. N. simakal is broadly similar to Nactus galgajuga (Ingram, 1978) which is restricted to a boulder-strewn habitat about 750 km to the south in mainland north-eastern Queensland, but is easily distinguished morphologically and genetically from saxicolines. N. simakal is the second vertebrate species to be described and considered