Whence
Poinsettia
Plant

Where does Poinsettia come from?

The poinsettia comes from the Pacific slopes of Mexico and Guatemala, where it grows wild as a shrub in dry tropical forests. Its red 'petals' are really leaves, and its journey to Christmas windowsills around the world began with a US envoy in the 1820s.

A shrub of the dry forests

Wild poinsettias grow from Mexico to southern Guatemala, in a range some 2,000 kilometres long. Most wild populations live on Pacific-facing slopes in steep canyons, in mid-elevation tropical dry forest. The Aztecs were the first to cultivate the plant and used it to make a red dye. In Nahuatl it was cuetlaxōchitl, which UNAM's Gaceta translates as 'flower that withers'. In Mexico today it is the nochebuena, the 'Christmas Eve flower'.

How Poinsett's plants travelled north

Joel Roberts Poinsett, appointed the first US minister to Mexico in 1825, began sending plants home, possibly as early as 1826, to his greenhouses in South Carolina and to the Bartram garden in Philadelphia. In 1829 the plant was shown at the Philadelphia Flower Show as 'a new Euphorbia with bright scarlet bracts'. A 2012 genetic study found that cultivated poinsettias carry a DNA combination found only in wild plants of northern Guerrero, matching the traditional account that Poinsett collected there in 1828.

Why people think of Northern Europe

Poinsettias fill European homes and shops at Christmas, and in 2018 Europe grew more of them than anywhere else: about 110 million plants, against 50 million in the United States, UNAM's Gaceta reports. The plant reached Europe from Philadelphia, when the Edinburgh gardener Robert Buist sent it to his homeland. But it is a tropical plant, and cultivated poinsettias are vulnerable to cold. Their leaves turn red only after weeks of long nights.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · profiles.wustl.edu ↗ · gaceta.unam.mx ↗

More Plants

Oil palm
Plant

Oil palm

📍 West Africa (Gulf of Guinea coast)

The oil palm is native to West and Central Africa, from Gambia down to Angola, where people have used it for millennia. Only much later was it planted in Malaysia and Indonesia, now home to huge plantations.

Sugar beet
Plant

Sugar beet

📍 Prussia (Berlin & Silesia), Germany/Poland

The beet that gives about a fifth of the world's sugar was bred in Prussia: Andreas Marggraf found sugar in beets in Berlin in 1747, and his student Franz Achard bred the strain behind the White Silesian beet and set up the first beet-sugar factory in Silesia in 1801.

Garden geranium (Pelargonium)
Plant

Garden geranium (Pelargonium)

📍 Western & Eastern Cape, South Africa

Balcony 'geraniums' are really pelargoniums from South Africa's Cape. Ships stopping at the Cape probably brought the first to Leiden's botanical garden before 1600, and crosses of two wild Cape species gave Europe its favourite window-box flower.

More from North America

Polar fleece
Fashion

Polar fleece

📍 Lawrence, Massachusetts, USA

Polar fleece was developed in the late 1970s at Malden Mills, a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, which turned its polyester baby-bunting fabric into a light, warm rival to wool. It was never patented, so fleece soon spread everywhere.

Crossword puzzle
Game

Crossword puzzle

📍 New York City, USA

The modern crossword began as a “word-cross” by Liverpool-born journalist Arthur Wynne, printed in the New York World on 21 December 1913. Britain's first newspaper crossword followed only in 1924.

Tap dance
Music & dance

Tap dance

📍 Eastern United States (New York to the South)

Tap dance grew up in the United States, where African American dance met Irish jigs and English clogs. A pioneer was William Henry Lane, "Master Juba", who danced in New York's Five Points as a teenager in the early 1840s, likely blending African American steps with jigs.