Three generations of the Ecke family: Paul Ecke (son of Alfred Ecke), Paul Ecke Jr., and Paul Ecke III.
Reproduced by permission of Paul Ecke III
The history of the poinsettia in the United States in the twentieth century has some well-defined landmarks. Major advances came about with the discovery of photoperiodism in plants by Wightman Garner and Henry Allard (1920). This led to the use of opaque black cloth to shorten day length. This was essential because the poinsettia is a short-day plant. The plant flowers when darkness lasts for at least 11.75 hours. It is the length of the night, not the day length, that is critical. Adding lights to interrupt the dark period prevents flowering. Shortening the day length and increasing the dark period induces flowering in the poinsettia. Increasing the day length by supplemental lighting keeps the plant vegetative. Management of day length permits synchronization of flowering in order to get plants to flower for the Christmas season. In all this one must remember that the colorful bracts are the major feature of the plant, not the tiny yellow blossoms in the center. The term “flowering” is used loosely.
The early poinsettias were still very fragile. Their leaves fell off quickly, and the scarlet bracts only lasted for about a week to ten days. It made it very difficult to get them into perfect condition by Christmas. That remained true until the 1950s. The late Lyndon Drewlow, a well-known breeder of poinsettias, recalled that he had to assist his professor at graduate school with shortening the stems manually and performing other maneuvers to get the plants into condition for seasonal sale (Drewlow, personal communication).
Radically different cultivars of poinsettias became available over time and changed the direction of its development. Some of this was due to the establishment of a number of breeding programs across the country in the mid-1950s, including Pennsylvania State University; the USDA Research Center at Beltsville, Maryland; and the University of Maryland. Private companies like Azalealand in Lincoln, Nebraska; Mikkelsens in Ashtabula, Ohio; Earl J. Small of Pinellas Park, Florida; and the Yoder Brothers in Barberton, Ohio, were also very active.
One USDA geneticist, Dr. Robert N. Stewart, separated out the most desirable characteristics, such as large bracts, stiffer stems, new colors, and the ability to last for a longer time, and bred for these. The key cultivars were ‘Oak Leaf’ (1923); ‘Paul Mikkelsen’ (1963); ‘Eckespoint ® Lilo’ (1988); ‘Eckespoint Freedom’ (1992); and ‘Eckespoint Winter Rose Dark Red’ (1998).
At first the Eckes only grew the two cultivars of poinsettia available before 1920: ‘True Red’ and ‘Early Red’. Their neighbors in Southern California used these plants to ornament their gardens. ‘Early Red’ was more useful for commercial purposes both as a cut flower and as a potted plant because it held its foliage longer. Three new cultivars were released in the 1920s, but just one of them, ‘Oak Leaf’, introduced by a Mrs. Enteman in Jersey City, New Jersey, dominated the field for the next forty years.
It was the first cultivar suitable for growing in a pot and also retained its leaves and bracts for a longer time. The other two, a 1920 sport, ‘Hollywood’, with wider, more compact bracts than ‘Early Red’, and the 1924 ‘St. Louis’ from Louis Bourdet in St. Louis, Missouri, did attain some popularity in their day. Paul Ecke devoted himself to selecting and developing better cultivars based on ‘Oak Leaf’. His introductions included ‘Henriette Ecke’ (1927) and ‘Mrs. Paul Ecke’ (1929). The latter, a sport of ‘Oak Leaf’, was shorter and had wider bracts than its parent.
Peach poinsettia.
By the late 1920s, poinsettias had become a commercial reality, and several firms across the United States grew them successfully in greenhouses. In Indianapolis, Baur and Steinkamp came across another sport of ‘Mrs. Paul Ecke’, which they named ‘Indianapolis Red’. Each of these sports offered improvement in habit and bract size.
Not all the new cultivars lasted well, despite their undoubted novelty. For example, the offspring of ‘Henriette Ecke’, a cultivar with “double” incurved bracts, which made the plant almost look like a dahlia, seemed very promising, but the bracts were deemed to be too small and the plants did not perform well in the greenhouse.
Demand has since risen for novelties, such as ‘Winter Rose Dark Red’ (1998), the first cultivar to have “curly” incurved bracts and very dark, incurved foliage. By 2004 it was available in seven different colors. Another series with curly bracts, Renaissance, came in at about the same time, specifically for the cut flower market. These varieties do very well as cut flowers.
Although the public finds new colors and styles very exciting, the traditional red poinsettia has remained popular, with desirable traits continuing to be developed. ‘Paul Mikkelsen’ from the Mikkelsen nursery in Ashtabula, Ohio, had a stiffer stem and greater longevity than any preceding cultivar. Eckespoint ‘Lilo’ was the first poinsettia with dark leaves and early flowering. It retained its foliage well but needed some special treatment to ensure good branching. Eckespoint ‘Freedom’ had all the above good points but more consistent branching. It was also ready to be shipped a week or two before Thanksgiving, allowing for a head start on the holiday marketing season. Another excellent quality was its ability to withstand careless handling by untrained staff at large nonspecialty stores.
Breeders have to respond to these needs and accommodate the public’s slightly fickle reactions. Since 2002, Ecke has introduced Eckespoint ‘Plum Pudding’, with purple bracts; Eckespoint ‘Chianti’, with darker wine-red bracts; Eckespoint ‘Shimmer Pink’, pink with white flecks; and many others. Eckespoint ‘Prestige Red’ has become the standard modern cultivar, and it already has many variations.
Poinsettias are no longer grown in the continental United States on a large scale. Almost all cultivation is now done in Central and South America. It is cheaper to grow the plants there because the climate is warmer and the cost of labor is lower.
The Poinsettia in Europe
The poinsettia was widely distributed across Europe by the mid-nineteenth century. It enjoyed great popularity for the same reasons it was so successful in North America, but because the plant had to be grown in heated greenhouses, it was an expensive luxury. Thormod Hegg, a Norwegian breeder, introduced ‘Annette Hegga Red’ in 1964. Hegg found that pinching the stem during development stimulated the growth of more than one inflorescence. There could be as many as eight of them. Hegg’s cultivars also came in a previously unknown range of colors. In addition, it was easy to propagate and grow commercially. The line lasted until 2002.
The Zeiger Brothers in Hamburg, Germany, instituted a breeding program. Gregor Gutbier, in Linz, Austria, introduced another dazzling series of colorful cultivars, the V-14 Glory Angelikas, in 1979. Ten years later, these plants reached the United States. One advantage they offered was an ability to withstand slightly cooler night temperatures. Gutbier was the first grower to realize that grafting an attractive plant with good bracts and branching onto a less well branched plant led to more uniform and successful results. Grafting was very important during the 1980s. Once the role of the virus was recognized, many more breeders were able to produce reliable new cultivars, and the market shares were redistributed.
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Chrysanthemum
CHRYSANTHEMUM HISTORY, like Gaul, is divided into three parts. The first part is the epoch of extensive and intensive cultivation in China, and later in Japan, lasting about 1,400 years from the fifth century BCE. The author of a recently published book about the origin of the chrysanthemum, J. J. Spaargaren, an eminent Dutch horticulturist, has elucidated this period thoroughly for Western scholars.
The second part was the initial introduction