Poinsettia Day

<p>On 12 December 1851, Joel Roberts Poinsett died at Stateburg, South Carolina, a former congressman, the first United States Minister to Mexico and a man whose political career had ended in some disappointment. He could not have known that the date of his death would become a national observance, or that the plant he had shipped home from Mexico two decades earlier would, by the time most of us encounter it, be the single most recognisable symbol of the festive season after the tree itself. Poinsettia Day, fixed on the anniversary of his death and formally designated by an Act of the United States Congress in 2002, honours both the plant and the restless Charleston diplomat whose name it carries.</p> <h2 id="the-plant-before-poinsett">The plant before Poinsett</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement"> <span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span> <ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center" data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946" data-ad-slot="3291553914" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins> <script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script> </div> <p>The poinsettia did not begin life as a Christmas flower, and it was certainly not discovered by an American. Long before Europeans reached Central America, the Aztecs cultivated the plant they called cuetlaxochitl, prizing it for the brilliant red bracts they used to make a reddish-purple dye and for a latex sap employed medicinally. The plant grew wild on the Pacific slopes of southern Mexico and Guatemala, a leggy shrub that could reach several metres tall, nothing like the compact potted specimen sold in supermarkets today.</p> <p>Its association with Christmas is genuinely older than Poinsett. By the seventeenth century, Franciscan friars in the Mexican town of Taxco were using the plant in their Nativity processions, and it acquired the Spanish name flor de Nochebuena, the flower of Christmas Eve, because it bloomed reliably in December. A Mexican folk legend attached itself to it: a poor girl with nothing to offer at the Nativity gathered a bunch of roadside weeds, and as she laid them before the altar they burst into crimson bloom. The poinsettia&rsquo;s link to the season, in other words, was made in Mexico centuries before any cutting crossed the border.</p> <h2 id="the-diplomat-who-lent-his-name">The diplomat who lent his name</h2> <p>Joel Roberts Poinsett was born in Charleston in 1779 into a wealthy family, trained in medicine and law, travelled widely through Europe and Russia, and entered politics as a South Carolina congressman. In 1825 President John Quincy Adams appointed him the first United States Minister to Mexico, a posting that ended badly: Poinsett involved himself so deeply in Mexican internal politics that the Mexican government requested his recall in 1829, and his name gave rise to the Spanish word poinsettismo, meaning intrusive, meddling behaviour. It is a rare distinction to leave behind both a beloved flower and a word for diplomatic interference.</p> <p>Whatever his failings as an envoy, Poinsett was a serious amateur botanist. In 1828 he sent cuttings of the cuetlaxochitl from southern Mexico to his greenhouses in South Carolina, where he propagated them and distributed them to botanical friends, including the Philadelphia nurseryman Robert Buist. The plant entered the horticultural trade under his name, and by the late nineteenth century it had begun its long climb to ubiquity. Poinsett&rsquo;s wider scientific enthusiasm outlived his diplomatic career: he was a founder of the National Institute for the Promotion of Science, an organisation that helped lay the groundwork for the Smithsonian Institution.</p> <h2 id="how-a-wild-shrub-became-a-houseplant">How a wild shrub became a houseplant</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement"> <span class="ad-label">Advertisement</span> <ins class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block;text-align:center" data-ad-client="ca-pub-3726833845844946" data-ad-slot="3291553914" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true"></ins> <script>(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});</script> </div> <p>The poinsettia we buy today is largely the creation of one German-American family, the Eckes of southern California. In the early twentieth century Albert Ecke began selling poinsettias as cut flowers from roadside stands in Los Angeles, and his son Paul discovered a grafting technique that made the plants grow bushy and compact rather than tall and spindly. The Ecke family kept that method secret for decades, which gave them a near-monopoly: at one point they supplied the overwhelming majority of poinsettias sold in the United States. The secret eventually leaked when a researcher published the technique in the 1990s, but by then the poinsettia was firmly established as the festive plant.</p> <p>The vivid colour, it is worth understanding, comes not from petals but from bracts, modified leaves that turn red as the nights lengthen. The true flowers are the small yellow structures, called cyathia, clustered at the centre. Growers trigger the colour change by controlling the plant&rsquo;s exposure to darkness, a process called photoperiodism, which is why commercial greenhouses can deliver millions of perfectly scarlet plants in time for December. A poinsettia needs around six weeks of long, uninterrupted nights, roughly fourteen hours of darkness daily, to colour up; even a brief burst of light at the wrong moment can spoil the timing, which is why home growers who try to make a plant rebloom must cover it each evening for weeks. Breeders have steadily widened the palette beyond the classic red into pink, cream, white, salmon and marbled and speckled varieties, and the named cultivars number in the hundreds.</p> <p>The plant&rsquo;s botanical relations are surprising. The poinsettia, Euphorbia pulcherrima, belongs to the spurge family and is a cousin of the rubber-producing and succulent euphorbias, which accounts for the milky latex that seeps from a cut stem. That latex, rather than any potent toxin, is the source of the mild skin irritation some people experience when handling broken plants.</p> <h2 id="why-the-day-endures">Why the day endures</h2> <p>Poinsettia Day is, in part, a tribute to the long traffic of plants and ideas across borders. A shrub domesticated by the Aztecs, adopted by Mexican friars, carried north by a meddlesome diplomat and reshaped by Californian growers ends up brightening homes across the Northern Hemisphere at the darkest point of the year. The poinsettia is among a small group of plants whose cultivation is tied almost entirely to a single festival, a seasonal observance built around horticulture much as a quietly specific food date such as <a href="/specialdate/us-national-spumoni-day/">a day given over to a single confection</a> is built around a single recipe.</p> <p>Keeping a poinsettia alive past the festivities rewards a little understanding of where it came from. As a native of warm Mexican hillsides, it resents cold draughts and sudden chills, so the journey home from a chilly shop can shock it badly; reputable sellers sleeve the plants in paper precisely to protect them from the cold on the way out the door. Indoors it wants a bright, warm spot away from radiators and from the icy gusts of an opened front door, and soil kept lightly moist rather than sodden, since waterlogged roots are the commonest cause of a sulking, leaf-dropping plant. Given those conditions it will hold its colour for weeks, and a patient grower willing to manage its light through the autumn can coax it to colour again the following year, a genuine horticultural challenge rather than a guaranteed result.</p> <p>It also offers a gentle corrective to a persistent myth. Generations of parents have feared that poinsettias are deadly to children and pets, but research, including a large 1996 analysis of thousands of reported exposures, found that ingestion causes at most mild stomach upset or skin irritation. The plant is far less dangerous than its reputation, a piece of folklore that has proved harder to kill than the plant itself.</p> <h2 id="around-the-world">Around the world</h2> <p>Mexico, the plant&rsquo;s homeland, still celebrates the flor de Nochebuena most fully, with December festivals in towns such as Taxco where the poinsettia features in Nativity displays. There is, too, a lingering question of names. The poinsettia is one of the few plants whose common English name memorialises an individual, and not everyone is comfortable with that, given that Poinsett was an outsider who carried off a plant the Aztecs had cultivated for dye and medicine long before his arrival and a diplomat whose interference in Mexican affairs earned him expulsion. Some in Mexico prefer to keep the older Nochebuena, a name that ties the plant to the Nativity rather than to the man who shipped it north, and the two names sit side by side as a small reminder that even a Christmas flower carries a contested history. In the United States and Canada the plant fills shops, churches and offices from late November. In Europe it is a standard festive houseplant, sold by the million across Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The seasonal economy it supports is substantial: in the United States alone, poinsettias are consistently among the best-selling potted plants of the entire year, almost all of them sold in a six-week window, a pattern shared by other tightly seasonal observances such as the small culinary occasions we catalogue, including <a href="/specialdate/us-national-pots-de-creme-day/">niche dessert days</a>.</p> <h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2> <ul> <li>Poinsett&rsquo;s enthusiastic meddling in Mexican politics gave Spanish the word poinsettismo, for officious interference.</li> <li>The poinsettia was a dye and medicinal plant for the Aztecs, who called it cuetlaxochitl, centuries before it became a Christmas symbol.</li> <li>The red parts are not flowers but bracts; the actual flowers are the tiny yellow cyathia at the centre.</li> <li>The Ecke family of California kept their bushy-growth grafting secret for most of the twentieth century, cornering the market.</li> <li>The plant&rsquo;s deadly reputation is unfounded: a 1996 study of thousands of cases found ingestion causes only mild, temporary symptoms at worst.</li> </ul> <h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2> <p>There is something fitting about commemorating Poinsett on the day he died rather than any of his political achievements, which were modest and largely forgotten. The flower outlasted the career, the grudges and the recall. A plant remembers its travels in a way a reputation rarely does, and the poinsettia carries the whole improbable chain, Aztec dye-works, Mexican Nativity scenes, a Charleston greenhouse, a Californian grafting bench, into millions of homes each winter, asking nothing in return but a warm windowsill and a little patience with the watering can.</p>