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Happy holidays! This week we’re revisiting our favorite festive stories from years past, like this one:
The poinsettia revolution was a long time coming. But worth waiting for.
It’s been nearly 200 years since Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. diplomat to Mexico, shipped Euphorbia pulcherrima back to South Carolina to propagate. From then, it was only a matter of time before bright red poinsettias became a Christmas cliché.
Luckily nowadays poinsettia breeders have come up with so many new varieties and colors—pink, apricot, white, cream, gold—that the poinsettia feels new again. This holiday season we’re liberating our potted poinsettias and turning them into cut flowers:
Photography by Michelle Slatalla.
For years the Ecke family of Encinatas, California had the market cornered on poinsettias—and deserves the credit for developing pink and white varieties decades ago. In recent years, varieties such as ‘Autumn Leaves’ (yellow) and ‘Envy’ (chartreuse) and ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ with splatter-pattern red and white bracts have broadened the offerings.
The colorful parts of poinsettia plants are not petals but rather are bracts that radiate outward. Poinsettia flowers are the unobtrusive cluster in the center.
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