Poinsettia Paradise

Consider the poinsettia: Originally, a wild weed native to Mexico.

A sixteenth-century curative whose sap was used by the Aztecs to control fevers. A plant so benign that were a 50-pound child to eat 500 of its leaves, he would suffer no more than a mild tummy ache, according to an Ohio State University study.

Somehow, this seemingly ordinary plant has morphed into the spirit, the very symbol, of Christmas itself. Each year Americans purchase nearly 100 million of them in the six weeks leading up to December 25.

The poinsettia’s long road to holiday ubiquity began in 1828 when Joel Roberts Poinsett, then U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, plucked a bouquet of the large, lovely red-leafed shrub from the side of a road.

Poinsett, an amateur botanist, transported the cuttings, Euphorbia pulcherrima, back to his native South Carolina. Not till 1836 did the historian and horticulturist William Prescott rename them in honor of Poinsett.

Over the next 64 years the poinsettia spread like the (lovely) weed it was, growing wild in arid southern California and in greenhouses across America. People were smitten with its bright, red-colored leaves, called bracts.

But the poinsettia of the nineteenth century wasn’t the beauty queen of potted plants we know today. It was gangly and untamed, its leaves varying in size and shape, its color wildly inconsistent. Then in 1900 Albert Ecke, a German immigrant, transformed its fate.

Ecke and his family had stopped in Los Angeles on their way to the Fiji Islands in the South Pacific, where they planned to open a health spa. He saw the poinsettia growing wild, and fell head over heels in love with it. He bought some farmland in Hollywood and then sold his plant from street carts. Around Los Angeles, they went like hot cakes.

His son, Paul Ecke, Sr., envisioned more. He would tame this wild beauty through special breeding and market it as a holiday plant. Most important, he devised a breeding system for producing picture-perfect plants that no other horticulturist could duplicate.

Then in the 1960s, his son, Paul Ecke, Jr., transferred the poinsettias from the farm fields to greenhouses, where he could control growing conditions and plant consistency. He began to ship by air instead of rail.

Until the early 1990s the Ecke family held a virtual poinsettia monopoly. Close to 100 percent of all poinsettias sold were Eckes’ plants.

It took a university researcher to uncrack the Eckes’ code. For years, horticulturists assumed they used a secret pollination process. Instead, they grafted two types of poinsettias—there are more than 100 varieties—to produce their prize plant.