In this volume, we encounter Lemoine introducing a dizzying number of penstemons, almost 500 cultivars. He did not do so badly with gladioli either, nor with pelargoniums, begonias, peonies, deutzias, and weigelas, yet even he was overtaken by another one of those industrious Scots whose energy and drive are legendary. In the modest provincial town of Hawick, Scotland, John Forbes developed 550 cultivars of penstemon. A few of his introductions are still available. It turns out that Forbes corresponded with Lemoine and used plants from Nancy as the basis of some of his crosses.
With more information resulting from persistent research, a pattern is recognizable. For every group of modest horticulturists who did fine work and left a small legacy, there were indeed formidable figures who once were feted and admired but whose names have languished unknown in recent years. It may seem pettifogging and unnecessary to bring back so many minor breeders, but the reward lies in restoring the reputations of almost larger-than-life horticulturists.
In nearly every chapter, the reader will find a heartening story of a flower breeder who built a vast business, supplying the rest of the United States with seeds and bulbs and even sending his wares abroad. As long as they lived, the businesses flourished, but unless they had children who took over, or devoted partners who continued after they died, everything evaporated. If ever the tag “Sic transit gloria mundi” applied, it is to the flower breeding business. These people are merely dusty echoes now.
Luther Burbank’s reputation is secure because of the scale of his achievements and the importance of his work. Burbank bred the formidable potato that changed the way this crop was grown and was a huge benefit to humanity. He also introduced many new types of fruit as well as some flowers such as the Shasta daisy, still a valuable ornamental plant. Because of these accomplishments, Burbank has become a legend.
Few can compete with that. Great flower breeders like Henry Harris Groff and his gladioli and Wilhelm Pfitzer with gladioli, penstemons, and several other flowers, for example, had triumphant achievements in their lifetimes. Pfitzer and his descendants won so many medals and cups that a numismatist wrote an entire book about them. But no one remembers Pfitzer or Groff today apart from relatives.
Such accomplishments have been absorbed into the sum total of horticultural knowledge as the world has moved on. The individual breeders have been forgotten. Many were extremely prosperous and well-known in their time, but now they have to be sought in archives. It is intensely gratifying to be able to restore their lives and reputations.
1
Poinsettia
WHEN THIS project began, I asked a distinguished horticultural editor if he would like an article on the development of the poinsettia. Until then he had put up with my peculiarities and indulged me, but here he drew the line. “Poinsettias,” he said firmly, “are not plants any longer, they are a commodity.” He truly believed what he said, but oh, how unfair.
The beautiful poinsettia, known for its scarlet bracts, comes to us encrusted with myth and legend, as befits a royal plant of the Aztecs. The Nahua people in Mexico called it cuetlaxochitl (xochitl is the ancient Nahuatl word for an ornamental flower). Poinsettia is a desert plant and very sensitive to the cold. As Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City) was at high altitude, poinsettia did not flourish there, but every winter the rulers imported thousands of the plants from warmer regions. Extracts of the plant were used to dye cloth, and its latex was used for medicinal purposes. The Spanish conquerors and missionaries attempted to erase all evidence of the preceding pagan Aztec religion, but records have survived showing that the plants were used for religious ceremonies in the winter.
Once the Spanish friars took over, they adopted the brilliant red plant as part of the Christmas ritual, and the Spanish-speaking Mexicans named it flore de nochebuena, the flower of the Holy Night (Christmas Eve). The vivid red bracts of poinsettia, which emerge in early winter, have signified the festive mood at Christmas and the joy of the season for over 150 years in the United States and Europe. In what follows, I hope to establish the actual story of its arrival in the United States and Europe and its extraordinary development, and will attempt to clear away all the accumulated misinformation and cobwebs.
BOTANY
The poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima Willd. ex Klotzsch) is a member of the large and diverse family Euphorbiaceae. The plant originated in southern Mexico and northern Guatemala. In its native habitat, this species is a winter-flowering shrub that grows over three meters high and is a common landscape plant. The sap is milky and may produce dermatitis in susceptible individuals. The umbel-like cymes are subtended by many showy bracts, usually red, but breeders have used their imagination to produce many different colors, including white, pink, and purple. In part this has been driven by the demands of the market.
Other major innovations in the poinsettia resulted from the remarkable discovery by Gregor Gutbier, an Austrian poinsettia breeder in the 1980s, that grafting poorly branched plants onto well-branched plants increased branching in the propagules of the restricted-branching plant. This effect was demonstrated to be due to the transmission of a phytoplasma from an infected to a healthy plant. The phytoplasma was later shown to be similar to the infectious agent causing peach X-disease and spirea stunt but acted in a benign manner in poinsettia. Once the role of the virus was recognized, it became standard procedure to introduce the beneficial pathogen to new poinsettia seedlings by grafting. Propagules from grafted plants kept their free-branching trait. Other innovations in poinsettia production include pinching to increase branching, and the use of growth regulators to reduce plant size.
Species euphorbias in their native habitat. Artist unknown.
Reproduced by permission of Chronica Horticulturae
Joel Roberts Poinsett. Artist: Charles Fenderich (1838).
Reproduced by permission of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
JOEL ROBERTS POINSETT AND THE POINSETTIA PLANT
The common name, poinsettia, honors an American, Joel Roberts Poinsett (1779–1851), who saw the plant in southern Mexico in 1828. For years it has been assumed that Poinsett came across the gorgeous plant in Taxco in southern Mexico, and took it home to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1828. That is not correct.
From there he is said to have sent cuttings to Colonel Robert Carr, a nurseryman in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, whose wife, Ann, was the granddaughter of John Bartram, the self-taught American botanist of the colonial era. In June 1829, Carr entered the plant as “a new Euphorbia with bright scarlet bracteas or floral leaves, presented to the Bartram Collection by Mr. Poinsett, United States Minister of Mexico,” at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s flower show, where it was seen and admired by hundreds of people.
Robert Buist, a Scottish nurseryman in Philadelphia, took the next step in its dissemination. He was so enthralled by the new plant that he took cuttings to his friend James McNabb in Edinburgh. From Scotland, it reached the distinguished German botanist Karl Willdenow in Berlin, who named it Euphorbia pulcherrima, in 1834. This remains the accepted botanical name. Two years later, Robert Graham in Edinburgh published his taxonomic findings and changed the name to Poinsettia pulcherrima.
Another myth pertains to how Willdenow came to study the plant. It is said that the plant somehow crept into his greenhouse through a hole in the wall, but the present director of the Berlin-Dahlem Botanical Garden, Dr. H. Walter Lack, told me that he considers this story to be completely false.
Charming and delightful as this tale of the poinsettia