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All About Poinsettias

© Mary Henry

Now that the holiday season has begun, the poinsettias are appearing. J. R. Poinsett would hardly recognize them as the plant he sent home to South Carolina from Taxco, Mexico in 1825. Those were rangy shrubs that reached 10 feet in height with reddish leaves at all the branch tips. They grew in the hills around Taxco where he saw them being used by the Franciscan priests in nativity processions during his tenure as the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico. He was a skilled botanist and a plant nut like the rest of us, so he sent some home. Over the years he shared plants with various botanical gardens and horticultural friends like John Bartram of Philadelphia. Bartram introduced a nurseryman, Robert Bruist, to the plant and he began selling it as Euphorbia poinsettia but alas, it had already been described by a German taxonomist who had named it Euphorbia pulcherrima, the name it wears today. That was not important ; poinsettia stuck as the common name in the New World and eventually won the day around the globe.

Where once they were just red and maybe available in medium pots and large pots, now they come in many shades of red, pink, white and even yellow. There are marbled ones, splashed and speckled ones, varieties with variegated foliage and even a new form called the "rose" form whose shortened and twisted bracts look very little like a poinsettia (or a rose for that matter). Some make large open shrubby plants with huge colored bracts that would have astounded the good Franciscans of Taxco. Others are compact and thickly branched with a multitude of colored growing points that make stunning hanging baskets or get trained into fantastic single-stemmed "trees". They are even manipulated into blooming in miniature 2 inch pots that can be added to holiday planters. You want it - somebody's probably got it. How do you decide?

Obviously, you buy what you like. However, here are some guidelines for selecting one. First does it look healthy? A healthy poinsettia will have unblemished dark green leaves clothing the stems. If the plant has been stressed, it may have lost lower leaves. You can tell by looking at the lower stems for the scars that show where leaves grew. If there are more than one or two, choose another plant. If the leaves look rolled instead of flat, it may have become too dry and will begin to drop those leaves in a day or two, so pass it up. Many of the large discount stores order massive numbers of poinsettias for special "door buster" pricing, then never water them at all, preferring to discard those that become unsaleable rather than pay for labor to maintain them. If you would buy those bargain plants, try to get them the day they get off the truck, otherwise you are buying disappointment. This is especially true if you are buying it as a gift.

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