In the wild poinsettia are larger and more gangly than what is marketed in North America. In a Florida garden they will be prone to leaf insects, particularly greenhouse whiteflies (Trialeurodes vaporariorum), which can then spread to other desirable plants in your garden.
Poinsettia leaves are green and red with the red-colored bracts often mistaken for flower petals because of their groupings and colors. Like many of our common plants in North America, poinsettia is largely an invention of the 20th Century, even though it was first introduced to the United States in 1829.
Close up of a poinsettia flower. The surrounding red leaves (bracts) are what makes the poinsettia recognizable.
The poinsettia carries the common name of the person who introduced it to the U.S., the first ambassador to Mexico, Joel R. Poinsett (1779-1851). from Charleston, S.C. Poinsett was an important figure in American history prior to the Civil War, serving not only as ambassador, but also as senator for South Carolina and Secretary of War during the Van Buren administration.
18th century drawing of Crown of Thorns (Euphorbia milii var. splendens) and Poinsettia (Euphorbia plucherrima). Euphorbia is a genus of succulent plants belonging to the family Euphorbiaceae. It is the fourth largest genus of flowering plants. The name of the genus derives from Euphorbus, the Greek physician of King Juba II of Numidia, who married the daughter of Anthony and Cleopatra.
Bracts and The Original Poinsettia
The plant that Poinsett encountered would not necessarily have looked like the short and stocky plant that one finds across North America at Christmastime. In the wild, poinsettias grow into tall and gangly trees, up to 9 feet tall, with blazing red leafs referred to as "bracts" by botanists.
Poinsettia flowers are surrounded by colorful bracts (specialized leaves).
In botany, a bract is a modified or specialised leaf, especially one associated with a reproductive structure such as a flower, inflorescence axis or cone scale. Bracts are often (but not always) different from foliage leaves. They can occur smaller, larger, or of different colors, shapes and textures.
As Secretary of War between 1837 to 1841, Poinsett had the particularly racist and dishonorable distinction of commanding troops involved in decimating Native Americans in the South; Seminole Indians in Georgia and Florida and displacing the Cherokees who hadn't been slaughtered in the East to the Oklahoma Territory, though the xenophobic processes had begun a decade earlier. Arkansas' Poinsett County, established in 1838, is also named after Joel Poinsett.
Poinsettia in the wild.
Mass Production
It wasn't until the 1960s that mass producing poinsettias began with the support of the government and one California farmer with a fondness for promotion. In the 1960s the cultivated poinsettia plants would last for only a few days before their leaves would wilt and drop. The plants were temperamental and hard to coax into flowering at the right time for market.
The velvety Red Scandic Red Non Bract by Dümmen Orange
To H. Marc Cathey, that was a challenge. As a horticulturist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, part of Cathey’s job was to create plants that growers could sell—to help create markets for plants people didn’t even know they wanted to buy. While researching which chemical controls plant growth Cathey found a few compounds that would, first of all, keep the poinsettia small and bushy, a compact plant fit for a house instead of a tree fit for the wild. He also discovered a trick to hold the plants back from flowering: Every night, from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., he would flash the plants with three seconds of light each minute, which would confuse them enough that they held their flower fire.
Orange? Yellow? Peach? Poinsettia hybrid.
California Poinsettia Growers
At the same time, a family of poinsettia farmers in Encinitas, California were working to develop plants that would stand up better to life indoors and that would flower longer. The Ecke family had first focused on the poinsettia in the 1910s, when the family patriarch Albert Ecke started specializing exclusively in poinsettias. His son, Paul Ecke, Sr., grew the businesses into a large poinsettia operation, and in the 1960s his grandson, Paul Ecke, Jr., pushed his father to modernize, installing greenhouses, selling cuttings instead of full-grown plants, and starting a breeding program to create more commercial plants.
A greenhouse full of the Premium Picasso hybrid, by Dümmen Orange
By the end of the decade, the plant had been fully transformed into the commercial product of today, and its popularity started to grow. By 1986, it edged out the chrysanthemum as America’s best-selling potted flowering plant (a spot it kept for decades, until edged out by orchids at the end of the 2000s). In the next decades, poinsettia would become $200 million industry, to the great triumph of the Ecke family. At one point, 90 percent of all poinsettias sold started life at the Ecke Ranch.
Paul Ecke III with the family's poinsettias, before the sale in 2012.
Check out all the varieties available from Drümmen Orange at this link: Poinsettias.
Poinsettia Pink Hybrid with tiny flowers and huge bracts.
The adoption of the common name "poinsettia" is due to a botanical tug-of-war that occurred between 19th Century botanists as they struggled to classify and name the plants that were coming to them from throughout the world. Robert Graham (1786-1845), a botanist in Edinburgh, Scotland, classified the plant as a new species and called it Poinsettia pulcherrima, with the new genus name honoring Poinsett and the species name translating from Latin as "very handsome" in reference to the flowers.
This name was accepted by our leading botanical figure of the time, Harvard’s Asa Gray, who was a friend of Graham. Meanwhile, in Berlin J.F. Klotzsch, the curator of the Royal Herbarium, was studying the collection of an earlier German botanist, Karl Willdenow (1765-1812), who had tentatively classified the plant as a member of the genus Euphorbia.
Eventually the botanists all agreed that Klotzsch was right, but by this time the name poinsettia had become entrenched as the common name for the flower.
Poinsettia white hybrid "Frozen"
After the Civil War, the poinsettia began to appear sporadically in East Coast greenhouses around the Christmas season. It was not until the turn of the century, when the Ecke family in California began growing poinsettias as a cut flower, that it really took off and became the floral symbol of Christmas. Today, the poinsettia is the largest single floricultural crop, with between 40 and 50 million pots sold each season.
Nochebuena
Florida Gardens
Growing poinsettia in your Florida garden is probably not worth the effort. The plants attract greenhouse whiteflies which are nearly impossible to eradicate. Once established whiteflies move on to vegetable crops and other ornamentals in your garden.
Daytona International Speedway is decked out in holiday lights. You can drive under the grandstands and view all the lights through the holidays. The show is provided by Advent Health and HBO Max and proceeds go to the Advent Health Foundation.
Magic Lights at Daytona International Speedway
The entrance to Daytona International Speedway
Christmas lights at Daytona International Speedway
Entrance to One Daytona (shops, restaurants, hotels) across in the Daytona International Speedway complex.
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