By Elizabeth Spence
Yes indeed! Since 2002, December 12th has been National Poinsettia Day. In the States, anyway. Has anyone heard of us celebrating this in Canada?
Not that we don’t know what a poinsettia is, of course. Almost everyone has had one of these lovely plants for Christmas at one time or another. They originally came in white or red, but the breeders have been at it for about two hundred years and are now producing quite unexpected re-incarnations.
Today you can get ones that are variegated, speckled, striped and in many hues of the original red and white.
Yet nowadays we are not stuck with the same old colours. For some years now things like this have been available:
Yes, you are seeing straight: blue, purple, orange, shocking pink and turquoise. Have the breeders gone mad?? No, they haven’t, but someone else might have.
When you examine these plants carefully you can see that they are originally white or cream coloured ones that have been painted. Sometimes they even have glitter added. Now, you can get a live poinsettia in any colour you want, sparkly or not as your taste dictates!
In fact, here’s Ball Seed showing you how to do it yourself.
It’s nothing to do with the breeders then, it’s to do with marketers fiddling with things to bring us something new and different all the time. How nice.
The poinsettia that we know is indigenous to Central America and Mexico where it grew in the understory of low-altitude forests. It had been cultivated, developed and used in various ways by the peoples there long before Europeans appeared. It was a gangly shrub growing up to as much as 15 feet high. In the wild it is still like this.
One of the people in Mexico and Central America were the Aztecs and their language was Nahuatl.
The word for what we now call “poinsettia” in Nahuatl was “cuetlaxochitl” apparently pronounced something like “kwet-la-sho-she.” There is great controversy about what the word actually means. One article has this to say:
In Nahuatl , the language of the Aztecs, the Poinsettia was called Cuitlaxochitl from cuitlatl, for residue, and xochitl, for flower, meaning “flower that grows in residues or soil.” In Nahuatl “cuitlatl” translates as “excrement” or “feces” but I think this definition is erroneous. According to my Diccionario Náhuatl (Herrera 2004) cuitlatl also translates as “abscess, tumour or growth.”
We are told elsewhere that “Birds would eat the seeds and deposit them somewhere, and so it seemed that the seeds would germinate and grow from bird droppings.” The name of the plant describes this.
There are lots of other suggestions, but I’ll leave that discussion here. The word “cuetlaxochitl” sounds intriguing enough anyway, even if we can’t pronounce it and don’t know what it really means. We do in fact already use two Nahuatl words as it is: “tomato” and “avocado.” Who knew?
The Aztecs associated the poinsettia with the winter solstice because it turned red at that time as the days had become shorter. It was used in ceremonies to celebrate the birth of their war god, Huitzilopochtli, the “left-handed hummingbird,” or hummingbird from the south. The Aztecs saw the south on the left of their world-picture.
Hummingbirds were the reincarnation of warriors who had died in battle, and the red of the flower symbolized their blood. When the warriors returned to the earth in their new form, they released the nectar from the flowers to restore the light to the earth. The star pattern of the red leaves represented the sun’s rays.
Below are two illustrations of warriors with poinsettias on their shields from a work by a Franciscan father, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, written in Mexico between 1540 and 1585.
This was a massive and very important work called Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (General History of the Things of New Spain). It is also sometimes called The Florentine Codex because the manuscript is held in a library in Florence.
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There is an even earlier story told by the Aztecs. It is said that the flower was initially white, but that after the people of the place now called Taxco in Mexico were killed by an Aztec tribe, it turned red when it bloomed next. Blood being symbolized again.
The city of Taxco in fact still celebrates its connection with the poinsettia every year:
The Aztecs used the plant widely in medicine – as a painkiller, to reduce inflammation and fever, to stimulate lactation, as an abortifacient, as a contraceptive, to induce vomiting, to remove warts, to treat toothache.
(It might be mentioned here that the poinsettia is not poisonous – a bit unpleasant, yes, but not poisonous to humans or animals.)
The Aztecs used it to produce red dyes as well, and in fact people are still using it for the same purpose:
When the Spanish arrived in Mexico in the 1500s they borrowed the existing traditions of the Aztecs and adapted them to Christianity. The poinsettia was no longer a representation of the sun’s rays.
It now depicted the star of Bethlehem and the colour red became a symbol for the blood of Christ. From very early days it was used widely to decorate nativity scenes. The Vatican began using the flower for Christmas decoration in the 19th century, and all Catholic churches soon started doing the same.
A new origin story emerged in the Christian context:
A young girl called Pepita (or Maria in some texts) wanted to give a gift to Baby Jesus at a Christmas Eve service, but she was so poor she had nothing to give. Someone (an angel or a cousin depending what you read) told her that even the humblest thing would be appropriate as long as it was given in love.
On her way to the church she picked a bunch of ordinary weeds and then laid them at the manger. Suddenly, they turned into beautiful red flowers.
This was considered a miracle, the simple weeds representing a gift of true love.
Since that time poinsettias have had a Spanish name “Flores de Nochebuena,” or “Christmas Eve Flowers” in Latin America. Here’s a modern Mexican poster giving information about the poinsettia:
So how did the “Flor de Nochebuena” come to be called “poinsettia?” We have to thank the Americans for that.
As far as is known, the first to send seeds and cuttings of the poinsettia out of Mexico were members of the Spanish Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain, led by Martín de Sessé y Lacasta (1751-1808) and José Mariano Mociño (1757–1820). They were followed by German botanists and explorers including Alexander von Humboldt in 1804.
Imagine – if these people had been given the proper credit for first introducing the poinsettia to the rest of the world, we might now be calling it “lacastia,” “mocinia” or “humboldtia.” Hmm.
Instead, the plant was by chance named after an American diplomat and explorer called Joel R. Poinsett. He served in the South Carolina legislature, and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1820. He was sent to Mexico in 1822 and later became the first U.S. minister or ambassador to Mexico.
As an amateur botanist, he was fascinated by the Christmas Eve flowers he saw at nativity scenes in Taxco, and sent specimens to his friend, Robert Buist, a well-known botanist at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in Philadelphia. Buist first exhibited the plant at a flower show in 1829 naming it “poinsettia” after his friend. The name stuck.
Over the years the poinsettia has been played with by the breeders to produce what we now recognize as our Christmas flower and to begin with, they were sold as cut flowers, because the plants themselves were so big.
California became the hub of poinsettia hybridisation, and in that warm climate the plant grew voluptuously outside. Here’s a late 19th century postcard from California with the caption:
“The Poinsettia,” California’s Christmas Flower
The first potted poinsettias were still fairly straggly things like the original plants in the wild. Here’s a Victorian Christmas card showing what they used to look like:
In the 20th century Albert and Henriette Ecke, German immigrants in California, started real work on the plant, and it is thanks to them – but mainly their son, Paul – that we have the Christmas flower that we so enjoy today. Paul continued the work until his death in 1991.
It’s sobering to think that the reason poinsettias are now bushy and compact is because they are infected with bacteria. Yes, infected.
Paul Ecke was trying to rid his plants of a mosaic virus, did so, but not completely. A kind of bacteria, phytoplasma, remained in the plants while the virus was destroyed. The effect of the phytoplasma was that it stunted growth and produced branches much closer together.
In this way Paul accidentally developed a poinsettia that was short and dense. He managed to keep it going by grafting, and ended up producing the plant that we know and love today.
No-one knew what was going on scientifically, but the marketing consequences were astounding. Poinsettias were now small enough to sell as potted plants, and off they went.
It wasn’t until 1996, only five years after Paul Ecke’s death, that research was advanced enough to understand what was causing the plants to behave in this way.
Today, all cultivated poinsettias are purposely infected with phytoplasma to retain their now familiar growth characteristics. But don’t worry, it’s benign and won’t affect any of your other house plants.
We tend to talk about the lovely red flowers on the poinsettia, but – sorry to say – they aren’t flowers, they’re bracts, or modified leaves.
If you buy your poinsettia when the flowers are very tight, it will last longer. If the flowers are opening and have little hairs coming out of them, it won’t.
When the days start getting shorter than the nights, the plants start thinking about reproduction: the flowers start developing and the bracts change colour ready to guide pollinators to the flowers.
By bearing this in mind, you can keep your colourful poinsettias repeating themselves year after year:
- After they are past their best, prune them back, water little and often and fertilize. You can put them outside during the summer.
- In early November, place them in a warm dark spot with up to as much as 15 hours of darkness a day.
- By mid-December the new bracts should be red (or whatever colour) and you can bring the plants out into the sitting room again, ready for the next Christmas.
- I know from experience that if you don’t restrict the light on them you won’t get the coloured bracts:
In keeping with our mission to include arts and culture in our website, we are delighted to show this piece by Valerie Cunningham. It is a gorgeous poinsettia-themed quilted postcard. Here’s the front of it:
Valerie says:
This is a patchwork Poinsettia postcard I made when I was a member of Sunrise Quit Guild. We were meant to mail them but mine never made it. I usually hang it on a doorknob at Christmas.
You may remember our article on the Remembrance Poppy for which another subscriber, Carol Fern Walton, sent us an image of her quilted postcard. There’s more information these cards in that piece.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as they say, and a poinsettia by any other name would be as lovely as it is.
We have already seen Cuetlaxochitl and Christmas Eve Flower. There are indeed many more popular names for the poinsettia, including Pride of Barbados, Crown of the Andes, Scarlet Cloth, Incan Headdress, Lobster Flower, Mexican Easter Flower, Mexican Flame Leaf and Painted Leaf.
The scientific name is Euphorbia pulcherrima and appropriately so, since the word “pulcherrima” means “most beautiful.” And the poinsettia really is, isn’t it?
Happy Poinsettia Day, everyone!
Copyright © 2024 Elizabeth Spence
2 Responses
What an interesting article – I always thought that the plant came from Africa, as there used to be huge bushes of the straggly kind in the grounds of the hospital that I worked in in the highlands of Kenya. I was there at the first part of the calendar year and they were red, despite the day light always being from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. all year round.
Hello Pippa: There were different but similar varieties of wild “poinsettias” growing in Africa and America. In fact one of the American ones has found its way to Asia and is now considered an invasive alien there!