No, Poinsettias Won’t Kill You
December 10th, 2019
One myth about poinsettias that just won’t go away is the one that claims they’re poisonous – enough so to kill people.
This is not a sea of death.
That belief apparently dates to a misdiagnosed death of a Hawaiian two-year-old in 1919.
Despite numerous research reports ever since, about half of Americans still believe that poinsettias are poisonous. Many people won’t buy one or even go near them.
It’s true that some people get a skin rash from the plant’s milky sap. And it’s true that a child could choke on the fibrous stems or that your dog might throw up if he/she somehow stomachs a cluster of the disgustingly bitter leaves.
But according to poison control centers and Ohio State University researchers, a 50-pound toddler could eat 500 poinsettia leaves and live to tell about it (and probably go on to a career in eating competitions).
I got a mention in humorist Dave Barry’s column once for reporting the OSU research. He mused about how researchers managed to stuff 500 poinsettia leaves down the poor toddler’s throat.
Anyway, the myth of the poisonous poinsettia is just one of the peculiarities surrounding this queen of holiday plants. It ranks as America’s top-selling flowering potted plant (even though hardly anyone buys one other than between Thanksgiving and Christmas), and it’s the one plant that even the non-gardeniest of non-gardeners buys.
In its natural habitat along Mexico’s Pacific coast, the poinsettia is a rather gangly 10- to 12-foot shrub that looks to be blooming red in winter.
I’ve seen them growing in the Caribbean landscape, and although their color is eye-grabbing, the plant itself is bare-legged and scraggly, not squat and dense like the ones on garden-center benches. Those are made compact via grafting, pruning, and growth regulators.
More impressive in the landscape is the poinsettia’s Euphorbia cousin, the so-called “flame of Jamaica” or “Jamaican poinsettia.” This one grows into a denser, six-foot-tall bush with the same brilliant rosy-red poinsettia-like bracts.
Flame of Jamaica, a.k.a. Jamaican poinsettia.
Look closely at a poinsettia, and you’ll notice that its brilliant color comes not from flowers but from the bracts, which are leaf-like structures that grow alongside the true leaves, which are green.
The flowers are actually the little, yellow, button-like clusters called cyathea at the center of the bract clusters.
What paved the poinsettia’s way to holiday fame is that this plant has the good marketing sense to scream red when most of the plant world is taking a winter siesta.
It does that because pigments in the bracts react to seasonal light changes, taking their cue when nights start becoming longer than days.
This is what drives poinsettia growers crazy because the plants are very picky about light, especially when they’re being coerced to color in time to meet store orders. Ideally, they want 14 hours of interrupted darkness each night for eight to 10 weeks.
These poinsettias are in the process of coloring in Quality’s Dillsburg-area greenhouses.
Mess up and they won’t fully color. Quality Greenhouses near Dillsburg verified that years ago when a crop of poorly coloring poinsettias was traced to stray light entering the greenhouse from nearby dock lights.
This is also the reason why home gardeners have trouble getting their summered-over poinsettia to turn red again the following year. Forget to turn off a light at night, and you’re stuck with a greenish poinsettia.
Read George’s post on how to get poinsettias to color back up
So how did a scraggly Mexican weed become our botanical icon of Christmas?
As the story goes, a little 16th-century Mexican girl named Pepita was sad because she was too poor to give a gift one Christmas eve to the Christ child. Her cousin, Pedro, suggested that even a humble gift – if given in love – would be acceptable to God.
So Pepita collected a bundle of weeds from the roadside and took them to the church altar, where the weeds miraculously burst into color. Ever since, Mexicans have called the poinsettia the “Flores de Noche Buena” – “flowers of the Holy Night.”
The first poinsettias to make their way into the United States came from Joel Roberts Poinsett in the 1820s. Poinsett was the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, and he was impressed enough with these flaming-red winter plants that he sent some back to his greenhouses in South Carolina.
They were an immediate hit, buoyed by their introduction at the first Philadelphia Flower Show in 1829.
Not only did the plant take on Poinsett’s name, the industry later designated Dec. 12 as National Poinsettia Day since that was the date Poinsett died in 1851. Let me be the first (and only) to wish you a Happy Poinsettia Day this year!
Poinsettias’ popularity really soared in the early 1900s when German immigrant Albert Ecke began growing fields of poinsettias in the southern California hillsides. His son, Paul, sold them as potted plants in 1920, and Paul’s son, Paul Jr., became the “father of the poinsettia industry” when he figured out a grafting technique that made the plants short and bushy as we now know them.
Since then, breeders have cajoled and manipulated poinsettias into endless variations – all in the never-ending quest to come up with something new and different.
Luv U Pink is one of my favorite new varieties of poinsettia.
We now have speckled ones, streaked ones, white ones, pink ones, yellow ones, two-toned ones, ones with silvery or dark leaves, and ones with mutated bracts that look more like rose blooms.
Sellers have gone even farther in using, over-using and, some would say, abusing poinsettias by sprinkling them with glitter, frosting them with fake snow, spray-dying them blue and orange, and sticking them into everything from tiny ceramic Santa pots to bow-adorned metal buckets.
Growers have even tinkered with the idea of producing poinsettias as summer foliage annuals. If you’ve seen a line called Princettias, those are very nice plants, but they’ve been cursed by the label of being a “Christmas plant,” not an annual.
Despite the huge variety in choices, the poinsettia choice of nearly three-quarters of buyers is still the basic red poinsettia with green leaves.
Almost all of the 30 million or so that Americans buy each year change hands in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Come Dec. 26, stores can hardly give them away.
Avoid drowning the roots, and you could see this plant stay in color for most of the winter. Some gardeners say their poinsettias are still looking good into April.
After mid-May, you can move poinsettias outside for the summer, where they make excellent tropical-looking potted plants surrounded by summer annuals. They’ll be just green by then (usually), but they make an interesting foliage plant.
I’ve even grown them in the ground as a backdrop for a planting of annual flowers. In our 90-degree, humid summers, they think they’re back home.
Read more in George’s PennLive column on five way to milk every last penny out of your poinsettia