Poinsettias changing colours of the season
December 6, 2010
Susan Reimer
THE BALTIMORE SUN
According to legend, a humble bouquet of weeds placed by a little Mexican girl at the foot of a nativity scene miraculously burst into brilliant red flowers, and from that moment, the poinsettia became the floral symbol of Christmas.
Red may be the most popular colour of the holiday plant, but thanks to plant-friendly spray paint and plant-friendly glitter, it is not the only colour.
Not by a long shot.
A Ravens fan? You can have your poinsettia in purple and black. An Orioles fan? You can have it in orange.
“Some people just want it to match their living room,” says Kerry Kelley of Homestead Gardens in Davidsonville. She “paints” a couple of hundred poinsettia plants each week between Thanksgiving and Christmas in a rainbow of colours.
As she explains that the specially made paint and glitter is applied only to the tops of the leaves, allowing the plant to “breath” from the underside, she is spraying a white poinsettia pale yellow and adding a pinch of neon salmon glitter to the centre of each flower. Then she dusts the plant all over with neon yellow glitter.
The result is breathtaking.
“If I don’t like how the colour turns out, I add more glitter,” says Kelley, Homestead’s annuals manager, who mixes colours to get the shades of green or purple that she wants. “But to be honest, no matter what I think, someone will like it and buy it.”
The paint job adds between $6 and $8 to the price of the plants, depending on their size.
A marketing ploy by the industry to revive poinsettia sales, the painted plants have been around for several years. They represent only a small fraction of total poinsettia sales, however, because while Kelley works on a couple of carts full of plants, literally acres of red, white and pink poinsettias stretch out nearby in the Homestead Growers greenhouses in Davidsonville, Md.
About 120,000 unrooted poinsettia cuttings arrived at the greenhouses in June this year from breeders in Guatemala, Kenya, Mexico and Costa Rica. They were given four weeks to root and then transplanted into 70,000 pots.
Under the careful management of head grower Oliver Storm, some of the cuttings will become poinsettia trees. Others will become hanging baskets. Some will have both red and white plants in the same pot. Others will grow to only six inches high. There are 50 different varieties, from the palest pink to burgundy red. From ivory to a yellow-white. Some of the petals—called bracts—are ruffled. Others hint at the shape of a rose.
There have been attempts to use different colours and different petal shapes to expand the poinsettia season to other holidays, such as Thanksgiving or Valentine’s Day or even Easter, says Storm. All were dismal failures.
“It didn’t work,” said Storm. “Because people would not accept poinsettias at any other time.”
Only a fraction of the 70,000 poinsettias under roof at Homestead Growers will be sold through Homestead’s garden centre.
More than 400 churches have standing orders for the plants, as do government buildings in Washington, including the Smithsonian. Not the White House, however.
“We haven’t delivered poinsettias there in two years,” said Storm, who provides mums for the president’s home and gardens. “We understand the first lady is not fond of them.”
It is ironic that a tropical plant should be so powerfully linked to a winter holiday. While serving as ambassador to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett brought home the plant, which Aztecs first discovered blooming in the highlands during the short days of winter and used as a fever cure.
Poinsett propagated the plant in his South Carolina hothouse and sent it to friends. The poinsettia was formally introduced to the public in 1829 at a Pennsylvania Horticultural Society flower show, the precursor to the Philadelphia Flower Show.
Known at first by its botanical name, Euphorbia pulcherrima (meaning “the most beautiful Euphorbia”), the plant by 1836 had become known by the name of the man who introduced it to this country.
But in Mexico, the poinsettia is still known for that long-ago miracle of the poor girl who was ashamed of her gift to the Christ child at Christmas Eve services: Flores de Noche Buena, or “Flowers of the Holy Night.”