Poinsettias: Rethinking a Christmas Cliché

Blissful holidays! This week we’re revisiting our favourite festive tales from years previous, like this one:

The poinsettia revolution was a very long time coming. However price ready for.

It’s been practically 200 years since Joel Roberts Poinsett, the primary U.S. diplomat to Mexico, shipped Euphorbia pulcherrima again to South Carolina to propagate. From then, it was solely a matter of time earlier than vivid pink poinsettias grew to become a Christmas cliché.

Fortunately these days poinsettia breeders have provide you with so many new varieties and colours—pink, apricot, white, cream, gold—that the poinsettia feels new once more. This vacation season we’re liberating our potted poinsettias and turning them into lower flowers:

Pictures by Michelle Slatalla.

For years the Ecke household of Encinatas, California had the market cornered on poinsettias—and deserves the credit score for creating pink and white varieties a long time in the past. Lately, varieties similar to ‘Autumn Leaves’ (yellow) and ‘Envy’ (chartreuse) and ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ with splatter-pattern pink and white bracts have broadened the choices.

The colourful elements of poinsettia vegetation are usually not petals however slightly are bracts that radiate outward. Poinsettia flowers are the unobtrusive cluster within the heart.