It’s that time of year once again. Those rich reds, soft whites and sometimes bright pinks have arrived, draping the edges of church altars, dotting front door stoops and livening up dining room credenzas and living room end tables: poinsettias are indeed the official flower of the holiday season.
And national poinsettia expert John Dole, a horticultural science professor with NC State University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is blooming with excitement to talk about his favorite plant. We caught up with Dole to learn more about the history of poinsettias, how they came to be America’s favorite Christmas plant and if they’re safe to keep around people and pets.
Check out these five facts about poinsettias and grow your knowledge of this beloved winter time foliage.
- Poinsettias are native to western Mexico and part of Guatemala. “They grow in the forest there,” says Dole. “They’re very tall shrubs, or, I’ve also heard them called ‘treelets.’” The Aztecs noticed the bright red blooms centuries ago, says Dole, and started to cultivate them. The name the Azetcs used for the poinsettia was “cuetlaxochitl,” which Dole says means “flower of the color of fire.”
- The poinsettia was first associated with Christmas when the Spanish began colonizing the region and appropriated the plant for nativity parades, Dole says. The Spanish called the plant, Flores de Noche Buena or flower of the holy night.
- Joel Robert Poinsett, the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, noticed the Flores de Noche and brought it back to the United States in the 1820s. From that point on, says Dole, the common name for the plant in the U.S. was derived from Joel Robert Poinsett’s last name.
- Over time the shrubs were cultivated and produced into a shorter plant that eventually became the potted flowering plant we know today. Paul Ecke, one of the larger producers of poinsettias in the country in the early 1900s, helped popularize poinsettias as the quintessential Christmas flower. Ecke, says Dole, would send flowering plants to the White House so they would be in all the holiday White House photos. Later, he would send them to the sets of newscasts so that poinsettias would be captured during filming. “This really helped cement in people’s minds the idea that poinsettia was the plant that you’ve got to have for Christmas,” says Dole.
- Despite what you might have heard, Poinsettias aren’t poisonous to people. Dole says smaller animals, especially cats, shouldn’t eat Poinsettias. “If a cat eats a lot of Poinsettia, they may get sick,” he says. “But in general, the small amount of foliage and bracts that pets eat is not a problem. Experts consider the whole pet Poinsettia toxicity thing way overblown. So, I would say don’t worry about it.”
