The Seeds Of A Christmas Tradition

Erica R. Hendry tells the story of how the poinsettia – named for the US Ambassador, Joel Roberts Poinsett, who first brought the plant stateside in the 1830s – was popularized as a Christmas flower by the “unheralded Ecke family [which] has more than 500 U.S. plant patents, nearly one-fifth of them for poinsettias”:

The earliest poinsettias were sold by individual florists and merchants—including the patriarch of the family, Albert Ecke, a German immigrant—and usually as single-cut stems instead of rooted in pots. But they were hardly durable; most would last two or three days, at best. The Eckes helped transition poinsettias from ephemeral flowers to potted plants, created new shapes and introduced new colors (from shades of white and yellow to those that have names, “ice punch,” “pink peppermint” and “strawberries and cream” among them). They’re vastly different from the poinsettias Americans knew a century ago, which were actually quite “scraggly,” says Paul Ecke III, who sold the Ecke Family Ranch in 2012. …

By nature, poinsettias are at their best between November and January, which aligns perfectly with the Christian advent season. For that reason, Paul Sr. started to market the plants as “Christmas flowers.”

“They didn’t really have a holiday to go with them,” Ecke said, as lilies, for instance, are associated with Easter. The name stuck and “that was really his claim to fame,” Ecke said, as the family would go on to push poinsettias across the country; in later years, the family provided poinsettias to the White House and to a number of magazines and television shows (including The Tonight Show).