The High-Handed Poinsettia
The palace of the last Aztec king, Montezuma (1466-1520), was adorned with a gift from the gods – Cutetlaxochitl – “the flower that perishes like all that is pure.” The Aztec’s Christian conquerors were soon to adopt this plant with green and red leaves to symbolize the blood of Christ and rebirth of life.
We know it today as Poinsettia. Native to Mexico and Central America, Poinsettias are not the neat 1–2 ft. tall potted plants familiar to Americans, rather they are a tropical shrub 4–15 feet tall!
The red leaf-like bracts or floral leaves beneath the barely noticeable flowers are what attracts our attention. A member of the spurge or euphorbia family, Poinsettia is known to botanists Euphorbia pulcherrima (formerly as Poinsettia pulcherrima). “Pulcherrima” means beautiful.
In 1825 soon after Mexico became independent, President John Quincy Adams offered the new diplomatic post to Tennessee Senator, Andrew Jackson. Jackson declined the position as he aspired to another job—the job that Adams held. The populist Jackson defeated the cerebral John Quincy Adams in the general election of 1828. President Adams appointed a South Carolina politician with botanical interests to the post of Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the U.S. Mission in Mexico City. His name was Joel Roberts Poinsett (1779-1851).
The plant that once adorned Montezuma’s palace intrigued Minister Poinsett. He sent cuttings back to Charleston, South Carolina, and to Philadelphia nurseryman Robert Buist. Buist shared Poinsett’s beautiful euphorbia with the first nursery to propagate the plant and offer it for sale—Bartram’s Garden in Philadelphia, America’s original nursery and botanical garden established in 1728 by John Bartram.
In 1829, Bartram’s granddaughter, Ann Bartram Carr and her husband Col. Robert Carr introduced “a beautiful euphorbia” into the commercial trade. In 1834, Buist distributed plants to botanical enthusiasts in the United Kingdom. Then in 1836, Dr. Robert Graham of the Botanic Garden Edinburgh named the plant for Poinsett.
The gangly, weedy greenhouse novelty remained just that until the Ecke family of Encinitas, Calif., developed a proprietary grafting method on dwarf stock and mass-produced the plant for the Christmas trade.
In the 1960s, air freight of this tropical plant made the widespread distribution of the plant possible. These are the seasonal potted plants that we know today by the common name Poinsettia.
If you are a savvy aficionado of Mexican political slang, you may honor America’s first ambassador to an independent Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett, as the inspiration for the word poinsettisimo—an expression denoting an obnoxious, arrogant or high-handed government official.