When J. Fred Rippy wrote a biography of Poinsett in 1935, he devoted one paragraph to the poinsettia story and indicated in a footnote that he had been unable to find any correspondence to validate the claim that Poinsett had introduced the plant. He commented drily that “it is generally acknowledged in the horticultural guides that Mr. Poinsett introduced the flower.”
Rippy cited the only reliable document of the era, a discussion of Poinsett in the 1887 Charleston Yearbook by Charles Stille, who had spent a day with Poinsett as a lad of twelve. Poinsett took the young boy with him when he visited the Reverend John Bachman, a Lutheran minister and noted naturalist who once worked with Audubon. The Yearbook article states: “Mr. Poinsett was rewarded for the interest he took in science by having a beautiful flower named after him.” There is some “difference of opinion as to whether Mr. Poinsett discovered it himself or simply introduced it to this country. At all events it is always known now as being named after him.”
At the time, the flower was called either “Mexican flame flower” or “painted leaf” in the United States. Neither of these seemed satisfactory, and this is a rare occurrence of a plant acquiring an enduring common name after it received its formal name, rather than the other way around. The choice of Poinsett’s name is often attributed to William Hickling Prescott, the author of the classic book The History of the Conquest of Mexico, but this too is a myth, since Robert Graham used the name Poinsettia in his taxonomic identification of 1836.
Poinsett was a very well-educated, cosmopolitan Southern gentleman of Huguenot descent from Charleston, South Carolina, who spoke French, German, Italian, and Spanish. He was appointed the first American minister to the newly independent Mexico by President James Monroe in 1825, but was recalled by President Andrew Jackson in 1830. Poinsett subsequently acted as secretary of war in President Martin van Buren’s cabinet after serving terms in the South Carolina state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives. He wrote a book about his first tour of duty in Mexico, Notes on Mexico (1822), with no mention of the plant.
Poinsett never enjoyed very robust health. He started out to be a physician like his father but could not complete the course. His lifelong interest in natural science stemmed from the preliminary studies he did finish. While in Mexico, Poinsett carried on an extensive correspondence about horticulture, exchanging seeds and cuttings with friends and colleagues in the United States. He also believed that the exchange of plants and seeds helped to promote stronger ties between the United States and Mexico.
Joel Fry notes that the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia elected Poinsett to membership in 1827. This broadened his correspondence to include members of the society and other Philadelphia savants. These connections appear to be the most likely route through which the new plant with bright red bracts reached the United States. There are fairly strong indications that it traveled directly from Mexico to Philadelphia, as four different collections of Mexican seeds and plants were dispatched to Philadelphia between 1828 and 1829.
William Maclure, the president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, and Thomas Say, a descendant of John Bartram, visited Poinsett in Mexico for three months in January 1828, traveling to Veracruz and Mexico City. Later that year, Maclure visited Poinsett again, and returned to Philadelphia in the fall with many seeds and plants. Say also collected more than a hundred types of seeds but was not meticulous about identifying them. Number 65, a “Fine Red flower, perennial,” could be poinsettia.
In November 1828, James Ronaldson, a Scottish enthusiast in Philadelphia, wrote to Poinsett, who had remained in Mexico until 1829, that he had received a box of seeds from Veracruz and assumed it had come from him. The fourth possibility was William Keating, a geologist who went to prospect in Mexico and met Poinsett. On occasion, Keating acted as Poinsett’s courier.
In summary, there is no doubt that the plant was being grown in Philadelphia when Colonel Robert Carr exhibited it at the first flower show of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in June 1829. Poinsett was still in Mexico, but it was generally accepted that he had had a lot to do with the plant reaching the United States. Perhaps the following extract from a letter from one of Poinsett’s friends in 1830 clinches the argument that these plants did not enter the United States via South Carolina. The letter discusses a woman from Charleston: “Mrs. Herbemont has been very vexed with you when she learned by the papers that several northern gardeners had received seeds and plants you had sent them from that land of vegetable beauties, Mexico, and that you had not in one instance remembered her.”
The Poinsettia in Mexico
The specimen received in Philadelphia was not a wild plant but had been cultivated and modified for many years in its native Mexico. Doña Fanny Calderon de la Barca, wife of the Spanish minister to Mexico, commented in her letters home that her church courtyard was lit by these gorgeous scarlet flowers at Christmastide. For reasons that are not clear, Mexican growers still believe that Poinsett devised a hostile mechanism to prevent them from developing or benefiting from the plant’s popularity, purely out of spite. Various publications in Mexico state that Poinsett obtained a “patent” in the United States, which led to this embargo.
Numerous scholars have searched through old patents and treaties but failed to turn up such an instrument. Although U.S. patent laws began in 1795 to protect inventors against their mechanical devices being pirated, these laws did not cover plants. The first U.S. law that did protect new cultivars of plants, the Townsend-Purnell Act of 1930, excluded seed-propagated plants, tuber-propagated plants (other than potato), and wild plants.
At present, international protection for plants is controlled by treaty (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, or UPOV, adopted in 1961). Seed-propagated plants in the United States are protected by the Plant Variety Protection Act of 1970, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Poinsett did negotiate a commercial treaty with Mexico as part of his ministerial duties, and it was ratified by the United States, but the poinsettia was not part of the treaty. Modern twentieth- and twenty-first-century poinsettia cultivars are protected by patents, but these are relatively recent advances.
Mexican animosity toward Poinsett has some basis in fact and this may have contributed to the myth of the U.S. patent. Poinsett was a very upright, even self-righteous, man and took his duties seriously. This led him to meddle in Mexico’s internal affairs, supporting one party over another, clearly an infraction of diplomatic rules. At one point, there were even death threats against him. All this contributed to his recall by the American president. The term poinsettismo is still in use today in Mexico to express arrogance and high-handedness.
The Poinsettia in the United States
North American nurserymen began to propagate the poinsettia rapidly and distributed it widely throughout the United States over the last part of the nineteenth century. The modern phase of poinsettia development took place in the United States by the early twentieth century. Poinsettias have led the sales of potted plants year after year, and the poinsettia is now one of the mainstays of the commercial flower market. This phenomenal growth is associated with the Eckes, a German immigrant family that settled in southern California in 1900.
Albert Ecke and his family stopped over in California in 1900, en route to Fiji, where they planned to open a health spa. They saw such an excellent opportunity in California that they settled there instead, with their descendants remaining through the present day. Albert began farming in the Eagle Rock Valley, near Los Angeles, but then moved to Hollywood. The family planted orchards and also large fields of chrysanthemum, gladiolus, and poinsettia for the cut flower market. By 1909, they had narrowed their floral crops down to poinsettia alone. Ten years later, both Albert and his eldest son, Hans, had died, and the business was taken over by the second son.
Paul Ecke Sr. moved it south to Encinitas, where it remains today. Paul